Wednesday, April 16, 2014

A Place Where Failure is Encouraged - Google X

As a teacher, my goal is to help my students learn how to do something.  Whether it is writing a paper, punctuating a sentence, or reading an article critically, I want my students to do it "the right way."  While I hopefully allow my students to make mistakes and learn from them, there are definitely times when I'm probably too narrow-minded in this regard.  This article about Google X on the Fast Company website really opened my eyes when it talked about how a large company like Google views mistakes.

I had never heard of Google X before reading this article, but it is interesting how they ENCOURAGE their employees to fail because they will learn from those failures.  Hopefully there will be a day in my teaching career when learning from a failure will be valued as much as doing something "right" because I don't want my students to fear failure.  I can think of many times in my life when I failed but learned a valuable lesson or solved another problem on which I hadn't even been focusing.  This article emphasizes that failure can be okay, and I hope to instill that value in my students.

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