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""Failing Forward" is a relatively recent entry into our cultural lexicon-at least as far has headlines go anyway-that has utility for students and teachers. Popularized from the book of the same name, the idea behind failing forward is to see failing as a part of success rather than its opposite. Provided we keep moving and pushing and trying and reflecting, failure should, assuming we're thinking clearly, lead to progress, So rather than failing and falling back, we fail forward. Tidy little metaphor. So what might this look like in your classroom?"

"As noted earlier, schools don't just fail from one day to the next. Every failing school exhibits warning signs that require action on the part of educators and community leaders. Individually these signs may not indicate impending failure; collectively, however, they clearly show that the school is either on the verge of failure or headed in that direction."

"When you have a dream - your own business, a great marriage, a career as an artist or an athlete - and you try for the dream but don't reach it, we call that failure. It hurts, failure. On the other hands. in places like Silicon Valley, failure is seen as good. It's practically a fetish, where never failing suggests you're not trying hard enough. And yet it seems only the winners preach that lesson. Are there times when giving up the dream makes the most sense? This hour On Point: failing - how we handle not getting what we want."

"Though there were a host of professional learning takeaways for me, one stood out as a real actionable item. Funny, this same theme came up at every conference I attended: Celebrating Failing."

"So your district or school is planning or in the process of implementing some sort of 1:1 device initiative. Seeing as these are all the rage, seems like it's a given that your deployment will be a smashing success, right? Here's the truth…. …it will fail. It may not be monumental failure, but parts of your deployment will not work. Whether it be the MDM that manages them or the rising stack of parent concerns, you will be faced with a choice as a district: retreat or carry on. In the wake of the LAUSD story and the recent Ft. Bend ISD news here in Texas about 're-evaluating' their deployments, I thought it'd be a good time to reflect on why some deployments work and some don't work. I'll let you know that our deployment was far from flawless, as I've listed here, but we had tools in place to overcome issues before they became an "Implementation Killer"."

"Contraption Maker provides a set of puzzles that are reminiscent of Rube Goldberg cartoons. Children use hundreds of parts like hamster motors, balls, and conveyor belts to fix broken contraptions. Moving down our knowledge funnel, kids can create their own contraptions and share them with the world. It's a digital sandbox that promotes creativity by experimenting with logical cause and effect consequences. A key component of excelling in a STEM career is learning via experimentation, which often means testing an idea, failing, reviewing the idea, and trying a new idea. Traditional teaching methods don't often have the latitude to encourage failure. However, experimentation and failure are key components in Contraption Maker. You learn by "failing" and testing new theories, and it is meant to be fun, not discouraging."

"The terms "fail forward and computational thinking" are trending recently, but what does that really mean? Computational thinking is a method of reasoning that teaches students how to solve real-world, complex problems with strategies that computers use. Computational thinking and the Design Thinking Process are frameworks for problem-solving to help address the need for 21st century skills across our nation's K-12 school system. To make 21st century skills easier to comprehend and teach, Tata Consultancy Services and Discovery Education have teamed up to introduce "Ignite My Future In School," a free resource offering professional development, educator guides, model lesson plans, and curriculum connector resources that provide educators and students with 24/7 support. Aligned to national standards, "Ignite My Future in School" provides teachers, including Learning Leaders, with exclusive, cost-free, professional development experiences across the country and the initiative inspires educators to adopt a transdisciplinary approach. As part of Ignite "My Future In School," we've identified seven effective thinking strategies to equip young innovators with valuable problem-solving skills:"

"As parents, we all want to raise kids who are smart and focused, especially in a world where digital distraction seems to be inescapable. (Even tech titans like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have strategies for limiting their children's screen time.) Why? Because in the future, there will be two kinds of people in the world: Those who let their attention and lives be controlled and coerced by others and those who proudly call themselves "indistractable." Becoming indistractable is the most important skill for the 21st century - and it's one that many parents fail to teach their kids. After years of studying the intersection of psychology, technology and how we engage with it, one of the biggest mistakes I see parents making is not empowering their kids with the autonomy to control their own time. Allowing them to do so is a tremendous gift; even if they fail from time to time, failure is part of the learning process. Parents need to understand that it's okay to put their kids in charge, because it's only when they learn to practice monitoring their own behavior that they learn how to manage their own time and attention. Teach them at a young age"

"Few middle schoolers are as clued in to their mathematical strengths and weakness as Moheeb Kaied. Now a seventh grader at Brooklyn's Middle School 442, he can easily rattle off his computational profile. "Let's see," he said one morning this spring. "I can find the area and perimeter of a polygon. I can solve mathematical and real-world problems using a coordinate plane. I still need to get better at dividing multiple-digit numbers, which means I should probably practice that more." Moheeb is part of a new program that is challenging the way teachers and students think about academic accomplishments, and his school is one of hundreds that have done away with traditional letter grades inside their classrooms. At M.S. 442, students are encouraged to focus instead on mastering a set of grade-level skills, like writing a scientific hypothesis or identifying themes in a story, moving to the next set of skills when they have demonstrated that they are ready. In these schools, there is no such thing as a C or a D for a lazily written term paper. There is no failing. The only goal is to learn the material, sooner or later."

"As we were having a great discussion about the connectivism article and what it meant for universities and their classrooms, one faculty member spoke up with this: I just wish they could find information better. They can't tell the junk from the good stuff. ….and that's when I started appologizing for our K-12 system. I find it sad that university professors are not using technology in their classes. They are not trying new things like posing interesting questions and having students research those questions and come to class ready to have deep discussions about them because "they can't tell the junk from the good stuff". As soon as this statement was made, heads started nodding around the room and with my own recent rantings on this subject as well….I led them into that discussion."

"Back in October, we published an article about the importance of holistic teaching. When students are stressed, their capacity for learning is drastically reduced. In psychology, Maslow's hierarchy of needs explains in part why anxious and depressed students are much more likely to fail. Even if the situation is not catastrophic, a student's mind and body "feel" that the situation is very serious. All their brainpower is fixated on dealing with the fight or flight response in the body, plus the repetitive thought patterns that affect daily activities like eating, sleeping, and relationships."

"Sometimes we focus on what an app can't do and forget to look at what it can. That's been the case with iBooks Author, Apple's e-book creation platform released nearly a year ago. Part of the problem was Apple's own hyperbolic statements about its "disruptive" nature to the textbook publishing industry. It failed to live up to the hype for a variety of well-documented reasons. But this post is about what it is, not what it isn't."

"At its core, the rise of "fake news" is first and foremost a sign that we have failed as a society to teach our citizens how to think critically about data and information. Take that email from a Nigerian prince offering to transfer you ten million dollars if you'll just send him $10,000 to cover the wire costs. Enough people get that email each day and wire those ten thousand dollars that this scam continues in 2016. The Internet has globalized the art of the scam and the reach of misinformation, allowing a single tweet to go viral across the planet, sowing chaos in countries on the other side of the world from the person sending it. At the heart of all such news is the inability to think critically about the information that surrounds us and to perform the necessary due diligence and research to verify and validate. In April 2013 when the AP's Twitter account was hacked and tweeted that there had been an explosion at the White House that left President Obama injured, automated stock trading algorithms took the news as fact and immediately launched a cascade of trading activity that plunged the Dow Jones by more than 100 points in less than 120 seconds. Human reporters, on the other hand, simply picked up the phone and called colleagues stationed at the White House to inquire if they were aware of any such attack and were quick to refute the false information."

"Why is it that sometimes we only see the extremes in our work? Picture your strongest lessons, activities, and projects juxtaposed against ones that just didn't work, and that's how it's been so far with our Digital Shop capstone projects. Some experiences make me want to high-five the entire class all at once. Others deserve an epic facepalm. As of this writing, we still have a month of school left. How will the remaining capstones go? What have we learned in the process? Can we "fail up" and finish strong, sending kids into summer vacation with school-year memories that will last forever? As I explained in my April post, I wanted the capstone projects to: Be genuine design thinking experiences. Allow kids to showcase the skills and dispositions they worked to acquire all year. Be based on and help people from the community and the world. The results have been mixed, as this post will illustrate."

"Whether it's Minecraft or duct tape wallets, the childhood passions that seem like fads, if not totally unproductive, can alternatively be seen as mediums for experiencing the virtuous cycle of curiosity: discovering, trying, failing and growing. At DIY, we've created a way for kids to explore hundreds of skills and to understand the ways in which they can be creative through them. Often, the skills are unconventional, and almost always the results are surprising. I don't think it's important that kids use the skills they learn on DIY for the rest of their lives. What's important is that kids develop the muscle to be fearless learners so that they are never stuck with the skills they have. Only this will prepare them for a world where change is accelerating and depending on a single skill to provide a lifetime career is becoming impossible."