There is a well used old teaching adage that goes something like this: “Give the kids an early taste of success.”
There are times though when I think it entirely appropriate for us to give students an experience of, and to celebrate failure. The very first thing I do with students in Create (a trans-disciplinary subject combining Music, Media and Drama) is to set my students up to fail.
We outline a fairly simple task, to create animals from a finite amount of newspaper and tape, the winning group being those that are the most creative. Now it’s worth pointing out here that part of the focus of Create is not just to create better musicians, actors and creators of meaning through media. It is also a fundamental part of the course that students become sensitive to and more adept at going through creative processes, taking with them transferable problem solving and thinking skills that will serve them in any discipline regardless of what pathway they choose later in their school career.
So the scene in my Year 7 classroom is very industrious with new eager students crafting beautiful turtles, giraffes and such; I even had a panther this year. When students present their work at the front of the class to be told they have failed, they are rightly furious and begin to ask “Why?”
Then there is the odd savvy group that have asked me a clarifying question such as “Can we make up an animal?” normally only one in each class if any. These groups are met with a clandestine and whispered response from me “Yes. And if you do. You’ll win.” The finger over the lips at the end of that sentence in now well rehearsed but it always has the same effect and it never fails to amuse me just how conspicuous 11 year olds can look when trying to hide something and yet no-one else in the class seems to notice.
So these groups come up to the front with their cross between a dragon and a goat with a lions tail, and they are lauded as champions for that short 20 minute task.
So the questions continue about “How come we failed and they didn’t?” and normally the conversation will organically arrive in the direction that I am hoping. Pretty soon the kids will wizen up to the fact that by creative, I meant imaginary. “Ah but you didn’t tell us that” they say and I reply “I know”.
Without putting you into the classroom with me it’s difficult to explain just how angry and let down the students can become. Here they seemingly have a lesson which is “fun” and they get to “make stuff” but the teacher is clearly a jerk! So we then talk about what a good teacher would have done, and I challenge them, or at least proposition them to challenge me. “Would a good student not have checked what the criteria were before they started?” We then use some statements on cards to debrief and unpack what steps the students took in their creative process during the challenge, and crucially what steps they should have taken and would do next time. The kids are very honest with themselves and it’s a bit like a magic trick, but if there is a team that has passed and therefore won the challenge their “What we did” is always remarkably similar to everyone else’s “What we would do next time”.
So I say “OK, OK you’re right, I was a terrible teacher, let’s try again” and set a new challenge, to make a map of the creative process on paper using our thoughts and findings from the debrief of the newspaper challenge. Again the kids are poised, eager to please. “You have twenty minutes again” I continue “and the winning map will be the most creative”. Brilliantly there is a moment like the needle scraping to a halt over vinyl. “Hold on hold” my students implore “What do you mean by Creative?”
And there is the learning, its not any facts so I am sorry Mr Gove (though I can assure you that that does come later) and hence the comb-over question. In fact it is a terrible question, are we judging the hair styles or the composition of the photographs and actually what do we mean by best?
The quality of thought that goes into and the resultant quality of the outcome i.e the maps is startling. The students are able to articulate through their maps what they would do next time, but the beautiful thing to watch as an observing adult is that they are actively acting upon their own feedback and the map is not just something that they creating but something they are following whilst they create it. By amplifying their mistakes through a carefully thought and frankly quite Machiavellian plot, the students are able to see that mistakes are a valuable and indeed necessary part of any creative or learning process on the proviso that they lead to change, whether that be change of the students’ practice, habits, attitudes or opinions.
Finally I must come to the child who was crying, I won’t use his real name. With one particular class I was remonstrating at the end of the less that the children “must challenge their teachers if their criteria are no good” and that they “must celebrate mistakes provided that they are turning points for learning” and a lad at the back stopped me and said “Sir, David is crying”.
This being my first ever lesson with the class I was very concerned that I had missed some kind of bullying incident and so quickly took the boy to one side. When I asked him what was wrong he said “It goes against everything I have ever been taught”.
For me, with that class, an early taste of success!
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