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Keith Hamon

The Necessity of Funding Failure | Wired Science | Wired.com - 0 views

  • The moral is that these scientists weren’t producing better research because they were smarter or more creative or had more money. Instead, they had more success because they were more willing to fail.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      These scientists both failed and succeeded at a higher rate than the other group because they were given space to play in. How do we create those spaces in our classrooms? I think games and free, non-graded writing help.
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    A few years ago, a team of economists at MIT and UCSD analyzed the data from NIH and HHMI funded labs to see which funding strategy was more effective. … The data was clear: In every biomedical field, the risky HHMI grants were generating the most important, innovative and influential research.
Keith Hamon

Every Child Is A Scientist | Wired Science | Wired.com - 0 views

  • The lesson of the research is that even little kids react to ambiguity in a systematic and specific fashion. Their mode of playing is really a form of learning, a way of figuring out how the world works. While kids in the unambiguous condition engaged in just as much play as kids in the ambiguous condition, their play was just play. It wasn’t designed to decipher the causal mechanisms of the toy.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      The drive for the "correct answer" undermines the role of ambiguity in promoting creativity and critical thinking in students.
  • According to the psychologists, the different reactions were caused by the act of instruction. When students are given explicit instructions, when they are told what they need to know, they become less likely to explore on their own. Curiosity is a fragile thing.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      In our drive to "cover the material," we too often destroy the very curiosity of our students that we so much want to encourage. And public ed has done such a fine job of destroying curiosity with its battery of standardized tests (one correct answer only), that even if we college profs try, we have to work against the learned behaviors and attitudes of our students, esp. our best students who have thoroughly learned & mastered the rote learning game. Free writing can help us create a space in our classes for experimentation and risk-taking, for creativity and critical thinking.
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    Pablo Picasso once declared: "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up." Well, something similar can be said about scientists. According to a new study in Cognition led by Claire Cook at MIT, every child is a natural scientist. The problem is how to remain a scientist once we grow up.
Keith Hamon

Frontal Cortex | Wired Science | Wired.com - 0 views

  • Because the subjects were thinking about what they got wrong, they learned how to get it right.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This suggests one of the strengths of reflective writing & ungraded writing: a space where people can be free to fail without a grade penalty and then reflect on that failure and learn from it. This works very much against our usual drive to transfer the "right answer" to our students.
  • The problem with praising kids for their innate intelligence — the “smart” compliment — is that it misrepresents the psychological reality of education. It encourages kids to avoid the most useful kind of learning activities, which is when we learn from our mistakes. Because unless we experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong — that surge of Pe activity a few hundred milliseconds after the error, directing our attention to the very thing we’d like to ignore — the mind will never revise its models. We’ll keep on making the same mistakes, forsaking self-improvement for the sake of self-confidence. Samuel Beckett had the right attitude: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Let's find ways to reward those who are willing to stretch into failure and then learn from those experiments-NOT those who seek only the safe, sure answer.
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    The physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as "a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." Bohr's quip summarizes one of the essential lessons of learning, which is that people learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. Education isn't magic. Education is the wisdom wrung from failure.
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