Diana Laufenberg presented at a TED talk in November 2010. The title of her presentation was "How to Learn? From Mistakes." She posed the question, "Are we really comfortable allowing kids to fail?" For Laufenberg, failure is part of instruction and the learning process. As teachers, we should be talking to kids about this process so they can let their ideas go without the worry of not succeeding. Kids need to know that it is okay to make mistakes and by doing so they will not limit what they can learn. Designing learning to empower students is not about right and wrong answers, but instead it is about expanding the scope of their abilities to think.
“If we continue to look at education as if its about coming to school to get the information, and not about experiential learning, empowering student voice and embracing failure, we are missing the mark. … We won’t get there with standardized tests and we won’t get there with the culture of one right answer. We know how to do this better, and it’s time to do it better.”
