Riding A Bike

I just bought a new book the other day called The Creative School by Ken Robinson.   It’s a great book about creativity, original thinking, the educational models of different areas and countries, and other topics. Someone who loves the educational world would really enjoy it. One great quote from the book is “We stigmatized mistakes. And we’re now running a national educational system where mistakes are the worst thing you can make and the result is that we are educating people out of creativity.”

I remember when I was first learning how to ride a bike. I had this orange and black bike which I thought was the most amazing piece of machinery ever constructed. Turns out it was a 20 dollar bike from Target, but that is a story for another time. My father took me out for my first ride, and I made the mistake of trying to gun it right out the gate and fly. I fell down about 4 seconds after he let go of the seat. I tried for about another 30 minutes and in the end, I made a bunch of mistakes, and I failed. If I was getting a grade on my bike riding ability I would have gotten the lowest mark.

But my father, thankfully, outsourced the job to my older cousin Brian who put me back on the bike and stuck me in the grass instead of the cement sidewalk. He told me to pedal around on the grass, and when I would fall he would show me where I messed up. He would talk to me about balance and he would watch again. He would show me how to break by not smashing the handle brakes super hard, and he would watch again. He didn’t give me a grade, he gave me meaningful feedback. Slowly I learned how to ride the bike. By the end of it I went from not being able to ride a bike to thinking I was unstoppable over the course of a few weeks.

In schools, sometimes we focus too much on the grade and not enough on the meaningful feedback that teachers give to students each and every day. That is what truly drives the learning.  Our staff has been working on utilizing smaller group instruction K-5 in all subject areas and conferencing with kids more and more. We’ve worked on making feedback to students more than just a yes or no and pushing them to dig into reasons and evidence to prove what they know. We’ve focused on Visible Thinking to make sure the students are aware about how they learn just as much as what they are learning.

I didn’t learn how to ride a bike, speak English, kick a soccer ball, write poetry, solve complex math problems, or analyze historical documents because I got a grade for it. I learned how to do all of those things because people gave me specific, targeted, meaningful feedback, in a positive manner on how to improve. The “grade” was a just a quick reference point for how I was doing.

Are grades important? Absolutely, but so are mistakes. They all fall under the big umbrella of feedback. I challenge us to think about how we can use mistakes in the same importance as we use grades to help guide students towards what we want them to truly learn.