As a recovering perfectionist, all of the talk about risk and failure in the education world today makes me understandably nervous. Our faculty started off the school year by learning about design thinking, a concept made popular by Stanford’s d. school. One of the key philosophies of design thinking innovation is to fail early and often, not getting attached to early iterations of the creative process along the way. Our faculty then discussed the New York Times article, What if the Secret to Success if Failure?. Here Paul Tough examines predictors of future success and as it turns out, grades are not necessarily the answer. Recently, I attended a design thinking workshop by Christian Long. He introduced me to the idea that if we want to be innovative educators, we need to live in the world of “perpetual beta”. The phrase resonated with me.
What does perpetual beta look like for me as a teacher librarian? It means stepping outside of my comfort zone and trying new approaches to research. Last week I worked with a Modern Middle East class on how to use social media in research. I put together a LibGuide, had students set up Twitter accounts, and introduced them to TweetDeck. Students found a relevant blog on their research topic and shared it with the class using their course number as a hashtag. Then I introduced ScoopIt as an alternate way to create a works consulted list. At the end of the class, I set up a research challenge for students to interview someone connected to their topic from another country via Skype. A few students looked at me perplexed by what I had just suggested.
The class went reasonably well but definitely left room for improvement. In retrospect, I should have had students use the online version of TweetDeck and I learned that not all students’ tweets would show up if they had set up their accounts with higher privacy settings. I assumed that our digital natives, having grown up in a participatory culture, would be well versed in Web 2.0 technologies. As it turned out, the students in the class had a wide range of knowledge and comfort with social media. My most important key takeaway was that although technology is the tool that facilitates research, information literacy skills should be at the core of the lesson. The next iteration of this seminar will be redone based on these new understandings.
Though I can’t go back in time, I can still craft ways to assist my current students. My first step was scaffolding the research challenge. After class, I reached out to a colleague in the international school community. She was able to connect me with history teachers at schools in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. The details still need to be worked out with pairing up students, but isn’t that what life in perpetual beta is all about? As educators we need to embrace the journey of teaching as much as the destination. Innovative methods involve creativity, risk, and sometimes even failure. I must say that being open to this less restrictive path is quite liberating for me as a teacher. By modeling these behaviors, my hope is that students will allow themselves more room for risk and demonstrate resilience when things don’t go exactly as planned.
