Productive Failure & instructional design

A few weeks ago, as part of my introduction to instructional design course, I got introduced to blogger & instructional designer Cathy Moore.   If you are deeply interested in how people learn, and what powerful, interactive e-learning can look like, you'll find her blog completely addicting.  She offers some basic, simple tools for corporate instructional design that seem so intuitive and non-painful (and heck, maybe even empowering!) for the learner that I can't believe that's not how all elearning is done.

One post, however, is one of those ideas that starts out rolling around in my brain, gathering weight and heft like a snowball as time goes on.  It's the idea of productive failure.  Check out her post about it here.

Here's the basics: the traditional idea of scaffolding education says: structure your teaching in an "I do, we do, you do" fashion -
show how it's done, practice together, then let students practice independently (and check their work).  This is how I've structured a lot of my teaching - and while students thank me for the structured rules and strategies I give them, I often feel like a drill sergeant, taking students through their routines.   Productive failure kind of blows the lid off of all of that.
With the idea of productive failure, you give students a problem and let them muck about  in confusion, wrong answers and frustration for a while.  Then you talk to them about their process, and what they've learned from it.  Then you go back and show them a method, rule or strategy.   (I found this slide show (link provided in Cathy Moore's blog) demonstrating a case study example and results to be enormously helpful in understanding the concept)

OK, so....my first response as a teacher was - oh my lord, but that would take so much TIME!   I've got my syllabus figured out, I've got a series of lessons planned that seem  to lead to success...where will I find the TIME for them to "muck about" with their bad ideas before I show them the right way. (oof, right?!)

And then I think, my goodness, have I fallen into the banking theory of education*?!?!?  Am I depositing information units into their brains when it comes to doing things like writing paragraphs or sentences?  Perhaps yes, perhaps no.

The real reason this struck me is that in my class I'm always  stuck with a problem.  You see, after my class, my students will have to go out and pass an intellectually complicated writing assessment, understanding a complex question and synthesizing multiple sources on a topic they may know nothing about.  In my class, I always help them structure & organize the essays that I give to them - "scaffolding" their learning - but I always worry - how the HECK do I teach them to do this on their own?  Personally, I'm VERY good at assessing a complicated set of instructions, understanding their overall "gist" or meaning, pulling out and prioritizing requirements, and envisioning a whole from these parts.  (could have something to do with the fact that I fashion writing prompts for a living, ha ha...).  I'm not sure I know how to explain these skills to my students...these are mental processes that come more or less automatically to me.  And they require VERY flexible thinking - the same words, structures and organization will not be the same essay to essay.

So here's where productive failure might come in.  As evidenced on the links above. productive failure is apparently very good for one thing: transfer of knowledge.   You see, direct instruction, like where I walk my students through the steps of crafting an essay paragraph, will be very good for "procedural fluency" - they will learn the procedure and do it well.  (something our DCC book calls a "well-structured problem" - I think students are incredibly grateful when I take something that seems like an ill-structured problem - an academic paragraph- and turn it into something like a well-structured problem for them - just apply rule and *presto!* you've got decent writing!).   But direct instruction falls down when it comes to things like analyzing data, understanding underlying concepts and transferring the information to a new situation - exactly what I need to prepare my students to do!

In the words of Ms. Moore, describing a side by side study of learners trying direct instruction & productive failure:

These “productive failure” groups were slightly weaker at applying the new process than were the “direct instruction” groups who were first taught what to do. But the former flounderers were clearly better at applying what they learned to other situations and at developing additional models that they hadn’t been taught.

In other words, there is a way to help students learn to address wicked or ill-structured problems: allowing them to try their own methods first, and going through that process of learning how to think about a problem.  This completely resonates with my own experience in math classes: I could learn how to do a formula just fine...but word problems always were so frustrating!  How to know which rules to apply?  I clearly remember thinking: "why hasn't anyone taught us how to figure out which formula to use?!"   Exactly.  They hadn't - because maybe they didn't know how to show us.

So this is my new challenge to myself as a teacher.  Find ways to start slipping in productive failure where I think it will really count.  Here's some reasons why I'm balking at the prospect:

• I'm afraid - afraid it won't go well, afraid that students will be annoyed, afraid that we'll run out of time for me to actually teach them how to do it properly (ugh, that word again!)
• Maybe there's even a deeper underlying fear about unleashing their own analytical and thinking capabilities...that's a weird one that just popped up (while writing) I'll have to keep thinking about!
• How will I fit it in?  Where will the time come from?
• If there's not time to also teach them the charts, maps, plans & outlines that they may never have even seen before (because their writing education was so freaking deficient!), I hate to watch them flounder and fail on high stakes assignments - when I could've just shown them an answer.

So I think this is a course-long and slow pursuit.  I think I need to offer them both - structured practice as well as a chance to attack the problem themselves.  (In a way, I do this with the drafting process - they come up with their best attempt at integrating sources, organizing an essay, creating a thesis, writing academic paragraphs, etc., and then we spend the next two weeks teaching them tools to improve those (ah!  do it right my brain thinks!) - so there's elements of this...and we do SOME reflection on the process as we go through it...but it's not quite exactly the same.

I'm gearing up to teach a new unit to my students giving a ton of methods and options to practice planning the structure of an essay based solely off of a novel essay prompt - precisely what they'll need to do for their graduation-requirement writing assessment.  I'm racking my brains for all the tools and tweaks I can use.  But I'm trying to push myself to also think about ways to incorporate productive failure.  I'm nervous but I'm willing to try!



* that link about Paolo Freire's banking theory of education starts out with a few paragraphs of astute summary of his ideas, but then continues into a fairly interesting critique of them as well.  You are invited to read as much or little as you feel useful!  :)