Hooray! You Got the Wrong Answer!

When you are blessed with a child who loves school parent-teacher conferences are a breeze. You get to hear how excited he is to try hard in class, how he's applying himself and outperforming his goals for the year. It's awesome.

What you don't expect to hear is "I love when he get's a different answer than other students in math."

Wait, what? You mean the wrong answer?

And right there, I've revealed myself as someone who learned in the way most of us did. With the goal of finding and demonstrating the right answer, then moving on. It's a way of learning that values memorization and recitation over critical thinking.

But what happens in the real world? You don't always encounter neatly packaged problems that you've practiced and memorized. And seriously, what could be more "grown-up" than peers coming up with different answers to the same problem or question?

Now I'm leaning in. "What do you mean it's good when they get different answers?"

The teacher elaborated, "When that happens we write each answer on the board (sometimes there are more than two different answers to the same math problem), then we ask the student(s) to explain how they got their answer. We all get to see them articulate their thought process, and often we learn a different way of approaching the problem. A wrong answer helps us learn together."

Wow. So many cool things to unpack. Think about what this approach to learning does for kids:

• It reduces the fear of failure, by positioning it as an inevitable (and important) part of the learning process.
• It encourages students to try hard and unfamiliar things.
• It puts students in charge, giving them the responsibility to prove they're right by teaching other how to get the same result.
• That last one is huge, because it means the focus is as much on the process as the result. 
• It shifts from individual effort to team-based problem solving. 

How often are you asked to do the things above in your everyday life? How often were asked to do them in first grade? There's a lot of frustration mixed opinions about the new way our kids are learning. For me this conference was a lightbulb moment. We are uncertain about how our kids are learning because most of us are trying to learn these things right now. What a blessing it is to give them tools to discover answers, as opposed to teaching them to demonstrate a finite set of knowledge we deem important.

The experience reminded me of a Ted Talk I encountered a while back. It was about a division of Google called Google X, that focuses on the most innovative ideas and projects the geniuses at the company can imagine. What's unique about Google X is that they welcome and celebrate failure, for many of the same reasons my son's first and second grade class gets excited about two different answers to the same math problem. Failure hurts us the most if we ignore it, try to hide it, or spend too much time and energy trying to perpetuate the wrong answer in the hopes that it will be right.