Critical thinking
This may be a bit non-PC but what made Europe a dominant
force in culture, commerce and science, was the critical thinking that
developed in Ancient Greece. This continued, with a long Dark Ages interlude,
when religion all but extinguished this mode of thought, to the development of
the scientific method and the idea that all knowledge should be seen as subject
to scrutiny, tested, and even then still open to future challenge. Quine
applied this to all knowledge. It has held us in good stead.
Learning through
failure
Learning is cognitive improvement. It is all about moving on
from one mental state to another that improves performance. These small steps
forward are, in fact, built on many of small failures. You learn to drive a car
by adjusting thousands of small acts of over-steering, going too fast, too
slow, taking the wrong line on the road, braking too hard…. You learn by
building on many, many small acts of failure. Learning to write means making
lots of spelling, punctuation and stylistic errors, eventually getting there
over many years. The feedback loop try-fail-learn-repeat
lies at the heart of the learning process. Unfortunately there is often a fear
of failure in education and training, sometimes even a blame culture around
failure. As an antidote to this, here are five levels of failure that one can
use when learning or designing learning experiences.
Level 1. Failure
recognition
We have all experienced those small, sometimes big,
sometimes catastrophic experiences of failure, even humiliation. The teacher
that told you that you’d never amount to anything, the exam failure and so on. Actual
failure is compounded by the fact that the learning game is soaked in the
language of innate ability not development and learning. From ‘Gifted’ children
to ‘Talent management’, professionals use the bizarre language of fixed ability,
often without realising the consequences.
The first step on the failure curve, therefore, is to
recognise and encourage what Dweck calls a growth mindset. This does NOT mean
endless praise, which can seem inauthentic and get counterproductive. It does
mean encouraging learners to strive for improvement and, importantly, not let
failure be the road-block it so often is at school or in other areas of human
endeavour. The simple recognition that failure is normal, happens to everyone,
and, when seen as the natural step towards improvement, can be turned from a
negative to a positive, is a mainstay of good teaching and learning.
Level 2. Tons of tiny
steps
Mathew Syed’s book Black
Box Thinking draws on many examples of successful learning through failure.
One stands out. When David Brailsford announced in 2009, that Team Sky would
win the Tour de France ‘within five years’ no one took him seriously. Within
three years Bradley Wiggins became the first Brit to win the race. Sure, he had
a goal but that is never enough. A focus on ‘leadership’ and ‘goals’ is never
enough. It is all about what Brailsford calls ‘marginal gains’, tons of tiny
steps, all adding up to bigger success.
In any learning domain this is all about breaking things
down into their constituent parts, mastering identifiable competences, and
getting them right. So much education and training remains aloof in high levels
of abstraction, hazy platitudes and generalities. What is often needed is
attention to detail. This is now commonplace in sports’ training but not so
common in education and L&D. It should be. In teacher training, for
example, far more attention should be paid to specific things one can do to
improve your performance as a teacher, through mentors or video captured
performance and feedback. If it’s about actual practice, lectures on learning
theory are not enough, deliberate practice and improvement really do matter.
Level 3. Deliberate
practice
Anders Ericsson studied the role of practice in sport, music,
medicine and other domains, where learners move from being novices to experts.
He identified several characteristics that distinguish ‘deliberate’ from simple
‘repeated’ practice. First, concentrate, as there is no real learning without
attention. Second, break down the task or skill into its constituent parts, so
that one you build positively on failure at this micro level, rather than get
discouraged by massive failure at the macro level. Third, focus on feedback
from failure, either by yourself or by a coach or teacher, as conquering many
small failures is the engine at the heart of learning. Fourth, increase the
challenge to accelerate the rate of progress. Push yourself beyond your comfort
zone, accept the fact that you will fail but embrace this as the price you pay
for progress. This is called
deliberate practice and upward trajectory based on overcoming failure.
Level 4. Catastrophic
failure
Let’s up the stakes once more. Safe failure in dangerous or
lethal tasks is the most obvious examples of failure as a means to a good end.
Pilots can crash and burn on flight simulators. Doctors can train on surgery
and other simulators without harming or killing patients. Emergency service
personnel can deal with fire and other incidents without anyone getting hurt or
dying. Why do all pilots do simulator training? They go down with the plane.
Maybe we should see most, if not all competences, in that light. We should be
allowed to push ourselves and accept that safe, catastrophic failure is a force
for good.
Simulations, boosted by cheap, consumer price AR and VR will
happen over the next decade or two. This will bring realistic, contextualised,
learn by doing, attentive learning, that allows as much failure as is necessary
for effective and speedy learning, way beyond most classroom training. This is
a fantastic opportunity to push learning away from its current theoretical bias
towards more realistic practice and success – real performance.
Level 5. Reboot
Let’s push this to one more level. An even stronger form of
failure is Reboot failure, where you identify failure, stop and send the
learner back to the start of a level or learning experience. This is the secret
sauce in successful gaming. You shoot away, get killed, get sent back to the
start of the level and try again. Why is this such a successful and addictive
feature of gameplay? It’s all to do with accelerating learning. You, in effect,
learn how to learn. Being subjected to failure checks your progress (constant
assessment), sends you back (repetition) and motivates you to try again with
greater effort or knowledge (learning). It’s a virtuous cycle.
This is the one feature of gamification that I like – Reboot
failure. Forget all of that Pavlovian froth – collecting emeralds, silver coins
and running around pac-man mazes, and focus on risk-reward failure within
levels. Allow the learners to try things and fail. But when they fail, the
equivalent of being killed in a shoot ‘em up’ game, send them back to the start
of the level to start again. Don’t be scared to punish failure as it not only
delivers repeated practice but the learner comes back eager to overcome that
failure.
There is even a games’ genre that takes this Reboot failure
to another level – survival games. In No Man’s Sky, procedurally generated,
never-ending, you explore a vast universe of planets but if you die, you get
reset back to the start of the game. Get the right balance between challenge,
failure and success and you have a multi-million dollar game or a brilliant
learning experience.
Conclusion
The most spectacular successes in human progress have been
grounded in the recognition of failure. From the critical thinking of the
Greeks – pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and others – through to the
scientific revolution, where we see the world as something to be subjected to
challenge, testing and falsification. Potential failure or falsification has
led to astounding advances in art, medicine, engineering and technology.
The airline industry is an admirable example of the
relentless pursuit of safety and quality through learning from failure. It’s in
their DNA. If only that attitude and process could be applied to education and
training. Yet the opposite seems to true. We wallow in the world of gifted
programmes, summative assessment for selection, lectures, essays, talent
management…. The world of learning is a failure factory, not in the positive
sense of learning from failure, second chances and progress but one of
selection, road blocks, disappointment, discouragement and real failure. As
professionals, we seem to have lost our critical faculties, stuck in a time
warp of old theory and models that were never verified in the first place; lectures,
hands-up anyone, Maslow, Myers-Briggs, Learning Styles, Piaget, NLP,
Kirkpatrick. This is not good enough. It introduces certainty where there is
nothing but ideological belief and unverified theory and practice. We need to
think critically and see failure as part of what it is to learn.
Bibliography
Thiel P. (2015) Zero to one. Virgin Books
Syed M. (2016) Black Box Thinking
Ericsson, K. Anders, Krampe, Ralf Th. and Tesch-Romer. Clemens (1993) The
Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance.
Psychological Review, Vol. 100. No. 3, 363-406
Ericsson K.; Prietula, Michael J.; Cokely, Edward T.
(2007). "The Making of an Expert". Harvard Business Review
(July–August 2007).
Ericsson, Anders K.; Roring, Roy W.; Nandagopal,
Kiruthiga (2007). "Giftedness and evidence for
reproducibly superior performance". High
Ability Studies.
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