Professional Learning for Busy Educators

It’s probably no surprise that most people who have attained some sort of success experience failure at some point in their lives. It’s a painful but often necessary path to growth, and if you take its lessons and pointers seriously, you might just find that it allows you to operate at a level that you didn’t think was possible.

Of course, it’s up to you to act on those lessons, but you don’t need to look too far to see the possible payoffs. As Michael Grothaus previously reported for Fast Company, many businesses we know today wouldn’t have existed if it wasn’t for failure. We wouldn’t have KFC had Colonel Sanders stopped trying after failing 1,000 times to perfect his fried chicken recipe. The Disney Company might not have existed if Walt Disney hadn’t been fired from a newspaper in Missouri “for not being creative enough.” The iPhone might not have existed if Steve Jobs wasn’t forced out of Apple in 1985.

But as we discuss with InternQueen.com CEO and founder Lauren Berger on this week’s podcast episode of Secrets of the Most Productive People, bouncing back from failure isn’t always a tidy process. You often need to allow yourself to process the unpleasant feelings that come with failure, before you can rationally assess what you can do better next time, or as Berger told us, “Figure out how to turn the no’s into a yes.”

"This past week I attend the Infosis CrossRoads Institute. It was filled with some great speakers and panels, but the most profound moment for me was a single statement made by Kipp Bradford, “failure is for the privileged.”

Fear, worry and stress. These are all normal processes we must work through at certain times and events in our lives, and we need to learn how to manage these. “Children should experience a healthy amount of stress.”So how do we learn? By watching role models, parents, teachers, other family members. Will children ever learn how to manage if we wrap them up and protect them, then expect them to be able to cope when they are older? We wouldn’t give a child a book and expect them to read it without teaching them the skills first.

We often hear the phrases “celebrating diversity” and “creating a diverse workforce”, and we need to adopt this strategy when it comes to children. It could be suggested that adults contribute to children’s worries and anxieties, so what can we do to change this, and who needs to take responsibility?

British author and speaker Sir Ken Robinson is known for several accomplishments, from his books to his professorships to his TED talks. But in 2006, he gained recognition for something that no other TED speaker in history has done. It was back then that he delivered a TED talk on the topic of whether schools kill students’ creativity—and today, that video has been viewed over 43 million times, currently holding the title of “most popular TED talk of all time.”

Well, it’s been ten years, and with the recent proliferation of terms like “personalized,” “mastery-based,” and “blended” in the education world, some of Robinson’s viewers may wonder if or how his take on schools has changed.