HOW: Failure, Oliver Sacks and "The Mind's Eye"

Listened to an interesting interview with The Mind's Eye author and neurologist Oliver Sacks on "Empathy as a Path to Insight" from Harvard Business Review's IdeaCast series.  As pertains to the classroom, what got me was this line:

"...I learn by seeing what happens when things go wrong.  It's very difficult to learn when everything goes right."

If you also learn that way –and many people do– it prompts a question for educators: do you design your lessons for what to do when everything goes right, or do you design for failure recognizing that failure is a teaching moment?  How can you create moments of controlled/uncontrolled (but always safe) failure for your students?  Should you?

cloudy sky and broken lamppost outside walmart
© 2010 ben capozzi

Some of my best teaching moments happened when something didn't work the way students thought it would.  If troubleshooting is par for the course in much of the ambiguous world of modern work and life –and it seems to be– how best can we bring that into the classroom?  While most of what I teach are technical subjects (computer graphics, multimedia) where if something can go wrong it will, I think creative failures can be built into any course and subject.  Are you designing your teaching activity around failure and the opportunities it presents, or around a series of artificial and unambiguous best-case scenarios?

Listen to the interview here.

~mrc