I Love Teaching Math & CS

I was honored to participate in the Seven for Seven session – seven educators speaking for seven minutes each – during the 2018 International T 3TM conference. My flash talk was titled Giving Students Space to Stumble, in other words, allowing students to learn from their mistakes in a low-stakes environment.  I referenced Jessica Lahey who posits in her book The Gift of Failure: “Small failures, when the stakes are relatively low and the potential for emotional and cognitive growth is high, are... called ‘desirable difficulties.’ Learning that comes with challenge is stored more effectively and more durably in the brain than learning that comes easily.”   I argue in my talk that we want students to stumble in our class for that is how they best learn! I then share a few strategies I’ve used in my AP Computer Science-A course on how to give students an opportunity to learn from their mistakes and reinforce the message that learning is iterative. The video of my talk is below

Eddie (not his real name) was one of 33 students in one of my AP CS Principles classes last year. Eddie consistently did not to do assigned homework for my class. He was always pleasant and polite during class and clearly enjoyed the content of the course. However, by March, I had become very frustrated that he would not complete his work. His lack of follow-through was particularly frustrating in an AP course which requires that students independently complete two performance tasks as part of the College Board requirements. Last year we lost the first three weeks of school to Hurricane Harvey, and lost a couple more school days to snow and then to the Astros. So I was running dangerously low on patience as I felt pressure to finish covering the curriculum during AP crunch time. By March, Eddie was badly failing my class because of missing and incomplete assignments. Despite verbal promises to me that he would submit his practice performance programming task, he did not. I was ve