Yesterday’s post on Education  Unbound  focused on how teachers can better support student learning  by embracing, encouraging, and supporting failure in the classroom. This might  seem shocking to students who don’t want their instructors to be rooting for  them to fail, but we are not talking about catastrophic, epic failure, but  rather the kinds of small setbacks that encourage learning. What does that mean  and how can you, as a student “fail” and still be successful in your educational goals?

“Learning from Your  Mistakes

1. Embrace Metacognition Metacognition is the process of thinking about your thinking. That may sound  convoluted, but it makes sense if you take a step back and think about it for a  moment. Rather than just accept that you got something wrong, think about why you got it wrong. Take an academic  failure for example and ask yourself these questions:

• Was this a mistake you make repeatedly? If so,  is that due to some knowledge or information deficiency you have, that you  might be able to remedy?
• Did you get it wrong because it is the first  time you have ever seen a problem like this? Would practice with similar  problems or tasks help build the skills you need?
• Did you not make a serious effort to solve the  problem, complete the assignment, or study the material? If not, why not? Be  honest with yourself. That is the only way to really uncover why the failure  happened.
• Was there a problem with the test, task, or  problem that confused you or made the process of succeeding unnecessarily  difficult? If so, do you understand the underlying concepts or skills and can  you demonstrate them on other tasks?

Thinking clearly and honestly about why you failed at  something is the first step in learning from it. If you are unwilling to take a  good hard look at your own actions and culpability in your failure, you are  unlikely to learn from it.

2. Ask for Help

3. Explore Alternative  Paths to Success

4. Failing to Learn is  the Only Real Failure”

Check it out:

http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2012/10/learning-learn-failure/

Stephen