How to maintain student failure

What school systems are for to a student failure comes in a myriad of forms. They talk about failing grades, dropouts, students at risk and test score failure.

Perhaps the most effective way to maintain these patterns is to continue this conversation about student failure instead of teaching failure. Change occurs when we stop blaming students for their inability to learn and to look instead at how we can transform the way teaching occurs. From this perspective it's not the students failure to learn but the systems failure to innovate in teaching.

The biggest contribution to the old conversation was the irrational belief that putting more pressure on students would somehow make them better at learning. This completely misses the point about teaching as being the effective focus.

The new conversation is about experimentation, trying new things and seeing the results iterating into progress. This is the only hope for moving education forward.

Preparing students for the future of work

If we're serious about preparing students for the workplace in the future we need to begin their connection to work early on in their learning process. This means getting them connected to local businesses and organization so that they could see what goes on in what they need to be prepared for in terms of character qualities and basic skill sets and mindsets. This is especially true when we are driving to grow a new generation of entrepreneurs. They need to be in the workplace volunteering, interning, observing and interacting. Workplaces can be amazing incubators for learning and education in ways that isolated school buildings and classrooms could never afford.