After posting last week’s blog about my fourth grade egg-drop exercise (eggs-periment?), I tried without success to recall how our teacher graded us. Two options seem plausible to me. The first is the inane, traditional grading approach we in America seem reluctant to shed. This perspective is fixated on the final product. We see this most clearly in our obsession with testing. We quarantine youth, then give them something akin to the “Hey kid, give me your lunch money” treatment. If they hand over the cash we leave them alone. They’ll go hungry for the day, but they’ll survive. If they don’t produce the cash, we ruin their day. In the same way, our system encourages us to hand out less-than-satisfactory grades to motivate students to show up the next day with an involuntary donation. If my teacher had applied such a system to the egg-drop it would have looked something like this:

A=Egg did not break or crack.

B=Egg had hairline fracture

C=Egg preserved its contents but cracked

D=Egg’s contents broke through but the shell preserved some of its shape

F=Egg shattered

The second option is that my teacher focused 90 percent of his attention on the process leading to our final egg-saving device, reserving the balance of his assessment for whether it actually worked. I’m reminded of Thomas Edison’s famous quote, “If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.” Oh, that a goal of our education would be that each and every student could say this with impunity.

It is conceivable that one of my classmates could have fully devoted his gifts to developing an egg-preservation device that unequivocally failed. Wonderful! A shattered egg is pure information, an immediate, unmistakable feedback loop that can inspire a successful subsequent design. My teacher, seeing the dedication and creativity my classmate applied to his process, would have wisely assigned an A. This grade would match the degree to which the student had availed himself of his natural gifts, not whether he achieved a successful product.

I’m struck by how much this latter description models real life. In real life failure precedes success. A musician must fail dozens of times before she learns to play a song correctly. Software designers develop countless iterations of a product before landing upon one that works. Chefs compose meals that resemble Costco samples before they master exquisite cuisine. The current state of education is at cross-purposes with real life. What if we trained teachers to model and encourage process and failure? What if colleges trained teachers to help students self-assess and improve their own process? Process would trump product. Failure would inspire future successes. Education would resemble reality.

Performance-based learning is just that, a performance. We train students to learn their lines for a single performance. The lines have no real meaning to the students. Students are unable to apply whatever they manage to retain to real life because the scripts are hopelessly out of sync with reality. Process-based education models that which we experience in reality: a superior approach to preparing our young people for life.

Tags: creative process, divergent learning, educational reform