« Revisions and Formative Assessment
Web 2.0 Learning Only Works With Critical Learning »

Baby Walking and Improving Student Learning

Published April 19, 2009 Academic , Accountability , Achievement , Assessment , Challenge , Change , Competency , Correct , Data , Edublogger , Education , Empowerment , Engagement , Error , Formative , Formative assessment , Forward , Grade , Growth , Improve , Learn , assessment for learning , formative feedback , monitor Leave a Comment
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

My grandson is beginning to walk. He takes about ten steps and then falls down. He crawls over to the nearest table/chair and gets up again. He does not get discouraged about failing to walk many steps. He walks some more and falls down again.

How do we help our students to not get discouraged about their failures?  Do we use the “fail forward” mentality that a failure is simply an indication that we tried something that did not work and now we can try something that can work?  A mistake is an opportunity to learn. When students see their answers and work  as work in progress, they are more willing to take chances and move forward. When we do not criticize them but help them to see how to improve, we encourage them to see failures as stepping stones as opposed to stop signs.

How do you show your students  that learning from  mistakes is a sign of growth?

My book, Formative Assessment: Responding to Students, is available through Eye-on-Education.

Reponding to Your Students

0 Responses to “Baby Walking and Improving Student Learning”

Feed for this Entry Trackback Address

  1. No Comments Yet

Leave a Reply

« Revisions and Formative Assessment
Web 2.0 Learning Only Works With Critical Learning »

RSS Education with Technology

  • Integrating Culture into the Foreign Language Classroom Through Technology February 7, 2010
    I recently did a presentation in which I showed three ways to integrate culture into the Foreign Language/Modern Language classroom. Each way presents current daily culture. The first  presentation focused on using Flickr photos to show the culture in a country. It demonstrates how to find images and how to create a cultural topic photo list. Another [...]
    hgtuttle
  • Talk About or Show Learning for Success February 3, 2010
    Last semester I had several sections of the same English class. Idid some action research.  Both classes had about the same average on the last essay so they were equal in ability.  In Class A, I explained in detail how to do a classification essay for a full period; I went step by step through [...]
    hgtuttle
  • A Writing Miracle With Timed In-Class Writing January 13, 2010
    In my college writing class,  for their last graded essay, the students have been writing in-class timed essays.  We started out with just doing the pre-writing organizing, moved to writing one period and revising  the essay the next period , and finally to a one period in-class timed essay.  About 80% of the students did [...]
    hgtuttle
  • Social Networking May Not be Productive December 9, 2009
    As I was out for my walk, I turned a corner and ended up behind a garbage truck (not a good idea). I watched as the man on the back who was emptying the garbage cans was talking on his cell phone.  He held the phone with one hand and emptied the garbage can bag [...]
    hgtuttle
  • Kiva – A Great Classroom Web 2.0 Tool and a Great Holiday Gift December 5, 2009
    Kiva is a micro-lending site ($25 and up) that loans money to low income entrepreneur.  The loans general last 6-12 months so that a class can make a loan and then trace its history of repayment. The site has a 96% repayment. The lender can select the gender, the  continent and the area of the loan [...]
    hgtuttle
  • Do We Know the Students’ Exact Progress in the Learning Standards At Any Moment? November 17, 2009
    Every teacher should know at any given moment where their students stand in regard to state standards, state assessments, or even the “final”. We need to focus on our students’ learning progress and how we can help the students to improve from where they are to where we expect them to be. Waiting until the [...]
    hgtuttle
  • Assess students’ academic learning, not Web 2.0 technology November 12, 2009
    I thought that we have moved beyond focusing on the technology to focusing on student academic learning.  I thought that back in the 90s.  However, I find evidence even today that technology still has become the true focus rather than student academic learning.  Whenever I look at the rubrics for an Web 2.0 tool, I [...]
    hgtuttle
  • Wiki- Collaborative Notes Instead of Individual Ones November 8, 2009
    My classes use a wiki.  If the classes are sections of the same course, they share the same wiki. For example, my 8, 9 and 12:30 classes are all Writing and Research so I group them together on the wiki.  I  have been having students from each class take class notes and post them to [...]
    hgtuttle
  • Assessing Learning with Web 2.0: Social Bookmarking November 1, 2009
    I was talking to  teacher who was so proud of the social bookmarking his students had done. They had collected over 60 links about the topic they were studying. I asked him if they had agreed on what tags they were going to use; he said that they used whatever tag they wanted.  Next,  I [...]
    hgtuttle
  • Build a real class learning community October 30, 2009
    Teachers can create a class community such as everyone knowing two things about everyone else in the class without having a learning community where students continually work together to better each other.   Likewise, teachers can have students work together (Student A does this/ student B does that….) without really collaborating (interacting and chan […]
    hgtuttle

Blog Stats

  • 268,203 hits