Don’t leave failure in the shadows - it can light your way to success

If we’re going to work out what works in schools, don’t tell teachers what to do – let them try things for themselves and see if it’s a success or failure for their class, says the Tes editor
26th January 2018, 12:00am

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Don’t leave failure in the shadows - it can light your way to success

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/dont-leave-failure-shadows-it-can-light-your-way-success
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Everybody loves a good success story. We all want to hear about that lightbulb moment. None of us wants to hear what didn’t work, unless, of course, it’s made piquant with a good dollop of schadenfreude.

It’s especially true in education, where there is a constant search for silver bullets - the most successful teaching methods, the best interventions and leaders and, at a policy level, the most successful countries. Finland, Singapore, Vietnam - which one is it now?

We have a never-ending desire to emulate, to lift and shift with no adaptations or concern for context. The problem is, as Dylan Wiliam, emeritus professor at the UCL Institute of Education, has famously pointed out, everything works somewhere and nothing works everywhere.

Undeterred, though, we battle on valiantly, plucking out those wins from the huge pile of losses. But that obsession with success needs to go, argues Nick Rose. We will learn more and advance further if we examine the failures and why they occurred, rather than performing a superficial sweep of successes, which are often as much about luck as judgement anyway.

We would do well to heed the words of the man who gave us the term “cargo-cult science” to describe how we try to imitate things without first understanding them - noted physicist and bongo-player Richard Feynman. “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” His plea was one for integrity in science, but it’s one that can just as easily apply to anything.

Examine the evidence

So how do we stop fooling ourselves? The answer has to lie in evidence, in examining what works and why, but, more importantly, really understanding what doesn’t work and why. We are on a continuous quest for certainty in a very uncertain world and haunted by a fear of failure and not knowing.

But it is an admission of ignorance, that we do not know enough, that will provide us with the answers.

The UCL Institute of Education this week held a discussion on “What if we really wanted evidence-informed practice in the classroom?” (watch it at bit.ly/IoEevidence). Of course, getting education research into the classroom is in theory eminently desirable, a no-brainer, but in practice it’s a little harder. Leaving aside problems of time, there is the trickier issue of autonomy.

Even though Sir Kevan Collins, chief executive of the Education Endowment Foundation, insists that evidence must not become another thing to tell teachers what to do, there is the danger that that is exactly what it will do.

It is teachers who have to translate education research into practice in the classroom. We need to leave them to decide how best to do that. They need to be empowered to use it and, if necessary, to call out a finding as unworkable in the real world - in their messy world, in their own context.

What won’t work is a paternalistic approach. Teachers need to feel comfortable thinking things through for themselves and deciding what will work in their classroom for their children. After all, teaching is as much an art as a science. If we go too far down the road of promoting the notion that as a teacher you can be professional only if you teach how the education research tells you to, we’re dismissing their experience, their instincts and their expertise, and instead of empowering them, we deprofessionalise them.

Education research, Wiliam has reminded us, can only tell us what was, not what might be. It’s the “might bes” that spur teachers on, but it’s the confidence to embrace failure that will show us that what doesn’t work is just as valuable as what does.

After all, as inventor Thomas Edison is reported to have said of his own pre-lightbulb moments: “I have not failed 10,000 times - I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”

@AnnMroz

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