IS FAILURE REALLY VALUABLE
Many people learn from a young age that making mistakes feels
terrible and can be embarrassing. That lesson often gets learned in
school. But in her TED Talk, Kathryn Schulz says those terrible feelings
come from realizing wrongness, not the feeling of actually
being wrong. Because often, people are wrong for a while before they
realize it, and in that intervening time, being wrong feels eerily like
being right. In education there’s a lot of talk about valuable failure,
the necessity of mistakes for learning and celebrating the learning
that comes out of being wrong. And while teachers, parents and students
may understand that concept in the abstract, in the moment, they still
don’t want to be wrong. To protect ourselves from ever being wrong, we
try to be perfect, but inevitably fail, making things worse. Schulz
points out that nothing ever turns out as we expect, and that’s a core
part of being human. Continue reading
4 EASY STEPS TO LEARN MATH
Math proficiency is a subject of a lot of anxiety for college leaders,
students and even national leaders. Employers and educators alike know
that math skills are crucial to many of the science, technology and
engineering jobs expected to be ever more important in the future, but
students’ math comprehension continues to stagnate. In his TED Talk,
mathematician Conrad Wolfram argues much of this angst is about how
well students can compute by hand, not how well they understand math. He
breaks math down into four steps: 1. Pose the right question about an issue; 2. Change that real world scenario into a math formulation; 3. Compute; and, 4. Take the math formulation and turn it back into a real world scenario to verify it. Continue reading
MORE STUDENT SUCCESS RESOURCES
I recently sent you an update noting that I had added a student resource about avoiding procrastination on the Teaching and Learning Faculty Development Canvas site under Modules. Here is another short article you can share with your students about studying. The author, Dr. Christine Harrington, writes, "The strategy that most students use- and is unfortunately the least
beneficial- is reviewing notes. Think about it- reviewing your notes
doesn’t take much effort or energy. It’s a pretty low level cognitive
task." Continue reading
