Challenge!

**Essential Question:** What can I learn from failure?
**Learning Targets:**
*What do you want students to learn today?*
Collaboration is an essential skill for success.
The process of trying is more important than being successful.
When you surround yourself in a culture where failure is celebrated for the lessons it contains, the world becomes less frightening and you feel better prepared to take on real world challenges.
This experience will create a common experience and shared language for students.
**Success Criteria:**
*How will students and teachers know learning targets have been met?*
I can try new things.
I can fail and understand the learning that takes place while I do.
**Core Content Anchor Standards:**
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.1: Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.9-10.1.D
Respond thoughtfully to diverse perspectives, summarize points of agreement and disagreement, and, when warranted, qualify or justify their own views and understanding and make new connections in light of the evidence and reasoning presented.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.9-10.2
Integrate multiple sources of information presented in diverse media or formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively, orally) evaluating the credibility and accuracy of each source.
**Essential Skills:** perseverance, teamwork, collaboration, creativity
Standards for Career Ready Practice:
Utilize critical thinking to make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
Demonstrate creativity and innovation.

Experience

Launching the learning and making connections to past knowledge.

Time needed for this section: 20 minutes.

Split students into groups of approximately 4 and give each group 20 sticks of spaghetti, a yard of string, a yard of tape, and a marshmallow. Set a timer for 18 minutes, and give the instruction that at the end of the timer the team that has the marshmallow supported highest above the table wins.

Students will work together and build. Many will not put their marshmallow on top until the end of the time causing their tower to crash, and will not have time to start over.

Discover

Discover something new.

Time needed for this section: 45 minutes.

Lead a group discussion on the success or lack of success that the groups experienced. What happened within their group? What would they change next time?

Expected student responses:

Our tower crashed. We learned we needed to plan ahead better.
We need to focus on time management.
We learned from each other and needed everyone’s ideas to make it work.

Encourage students to think deeply about striving for perfection and what can be learned from failure.

Have students read and annotate these two articles: Innovation Leadership Lessons and The Waste of Creative Talents

**You may also choose to quantify how students mark the text as they read, for example:

Write a one sentence summary for every couple of paragraphs
Ask 2-3 questions per page
Underline new or unusual vocabulary

Ask students to compare these two articles. Some suggested questions for comparison are:

What do these two studies mean? What do 5-year-old students have that we lose as we grow up?
What do we need to do to sustain these skills that we need to be successful in life?
Ultimately, what can we learn from prototyping and failing?

Important points from the articles:

Kindergarteners, on average, do better than business people and lawyers. Show graph and explain where the tallest tower in this group would show up on the graph.
According to NASA 98% of 4 and 5 year olds have genius levels of creativity while only 2% of adults retain those skills.

Optional Extension Activity: Show students this TedTalk and compare and contrast how these diverse media formats covey the message.

Define

Seeing the new discovering in action.

Time needed for this section: 20 minutes.

Have students take http://www.testmycreativity.com/ assessment to determine their level of creativity.

Creativity is defined as:

Abstraction: The ability to abstract concepts from ideas
Connection: The ability to make connections between things that don't initially have an apparent connection
Perspective: The ability to shift ones perspective on a situation - in terms of space and time, and other people
Curiosity: The desire to change or improve things that everyone else accepts as the norm
Boldness: The confidence to push boundaries beyond accepted conventions. Also the ability to eliminate fear of what others think of you
Paradox: The ability to simultaneously accept and work with statements that are contradictory
Complexity: The ability to carry large quantities of information and be able to manipulate and manage the relationships between such information
Persistence: The ability to force oneself to keep trying to derive more and stronger solutions even when good ones have already been generated

Reflect

Applying the information to real life.

Using the Reflection Document, have students screenshot their creativity results and paste them into the document. Students describe their strongest area of creativity and the one that they would like to work on the most. Brainstorm ideas that will help them practice and improve in these areas.

Close workshop by making a point that some things are easier or more difficult for us based on our personality and our traits. For example, someone may find it easy to stick to a list, while another person may find it difficult. This doesn’t mean that those two people should give up on tasks because they are more difficult. In this workshop we learned that failure makes our brains grow and allows us to be more creative. The world of work needs creative geniuses! How can you find that 5-year-old you again? In our next workshop we will be taking a personality assessment to help us explain more about ourselves and help us discover what our purpose is.