“The person who never made a mistake never made anything”.

These words of wisdom are usually attributed to Einstein, which means they probably came from someone else entirely.

Maybe it was he who said, “Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.”

Certainly this is true of how children learn grammar – educationalists refer to “virtuous errors” when a child makes an utterance that you and I know is wrong, but which conforms to the rules. That  I writed this myself, is proof enough, should you need it!

I’ve been turning these things over in my mind since I listened to Roger Schank’s somewhat controversial keynote at Learning Technologies 2011 Conference. Do we learn by making mistakes, or does the experience of failure depress our self-esteem and so damage our confidence?

Schank has been around since the 1970s and even as I went through a course on emerging educational theories in the 1970s, his work had begun to resonate around the world. The 1970s were on the cusp of the so-called ‘permissive society’ in which self-determination was highly valued. The power was already shifting from teachers to learners. At that time in the UK the popularity of ‘open plan’ schools encouraged a new way of teaching – not to whole-classes through rote learning and memorisation, but through learner-centred teaching methods. We still had the shining example of Summerhill, A.S. Neill’s revolutionary boarding school founded in 1921 and deeply despised by the Ministry of Education of the day. There the simple premise was that school, and all that happened within, was for the benefit of learners and not of The Curriculum, The System or The Teacher. This did not sit well with a governing authority that just knew that The 3 Rs, British Colonial History and Capes-and-Bays Geography was all a child needed to know.

Suppose you were to set up a system in which learners formed a democratic cohort, and exerted as much influence as anyone else over the content and conduct of the curriculum, and the environment for learning; a place where learners could decide which lessons they needed and wanted to attend. A place in which it was not only safe to fail, but in which learning from mistakes was encouraged and supported. This is precisely what Neill did under the guiding principle of “Freedom, not Licence.”

And so back to Roger Schank, who is adamant that the only way we learn is by “doing,” and through failure. In his keynote he went beyond this to argue that not only is failure tolerable, it is desirable, even essential. He is of the opinion that we are affected emotionally by failure, and that it stimulates an irresistible drive in us to do better next time.

The argument moves on to recognition that classrooms are not conducive to deeply introspective emotional self-examination. E-learning, by contrast allows unlimited experimentation, trial and error and ultimate mastery without penalty.

And I agree whole-heartedly, but only as long as the consequences are set right. In a climate where failure is met with “oops” and success with a shallow “well done”, there is little chance of positive reinforcement. I know that mastery of a task may be intrinsically rewarding, but most of the e-learning I see simply doesn’t accommodate that. And even though we talk a good game about social and collaborative learning, I’ve not yet seen many examples of this being done through well-managed, well mediated shared e-learning. Nor have I met many who accept that e-learning is still e-learning when it acts as a catalyst for experiential activity on the shop floor, in factories, parks, service stations or stadia.

So my call is for three things to support that hugely valuable process of engineering failure as a stimulus for learning:

1. a favourable working environment in which it is safe to fail and to report on your failure as a contribution towards continuous performance improvement
2. learning packages (e- or otherwise) that offer richly contextual feedback in a natural and authentic way, that keeps as close as possible to “the real thing”
3. an understanding and an acceptance that “blending” can surely include things that you might not associate with “learning” or “teaching” at all.

I’m still working on these ideas.

I’ll come back later with some thoughts on feedback in e-learning, but I’d like to hear your views first.