Key points for me:

– Children think of possibilities and dream about perfection.
– Learning between teachers and students should be reciprocal but the reality is not that because of trust or rather the lack of it.
– Children love challenges. Adults must learn to trust them and have high expectations from them.

The post Adults Should Learn From Kids first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

Dr. Chatterjee shared an example of an organization in Bangalore that dedicates a day each month to discuss their ‘best mistakes’. Senior executives share their biggest failures and what they learnt from it. I see tremendous merit in such an idea as it drives away the fear of failure from staff’s minds. Once liberated from that fear, good things can happen.

I am keen to try such a thing at Upside as well. I’m looking for support – case studies or maybe some ‘dos and don’ts’ on how to go about learning from “Best-Mistakes”.

I could find just this link to a July 2006 article in Business Week How Failure Breeds Success which has some examples mentioned– IBM, Intuit, GE, Coring, Virgin, & JetBlue.

The post How to Learn From Your Best-Failures? first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

To me experience is the best teacher and you learn immensely from your failures/mistakes. Last week I read this article on Science Daily that challenges this popular perception. It suggests we learn more from successes than failures and states:

In the July 30 issue of the journal Neuron, Earl K. Miller, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience, and MIT colleagues Mark Histed and Anitha Pasupathy have created for the first time a unique snapshot of the learning process that shows how single cells change their responses in real time as a result of information about what is the right action and what is the wrong one.

“We have shown that brain cells keep track of whether recent behaviors were successful or not,” Miller said. Furthermore, when a behavior was successful, cells became more finely tuned to what the animal was learning. After a failure, there was little or no change in the brain — nor was there any improvement in behavior.

The study sheds light on the neural mechanisms linking environmental feedback to neural plasticity — the brain’s ability to change in response to experience. It has implications for understanding how we learn, and understanding and treating learning disorders.

Somehow that does not sound quite right to me. I am not saying you don’t learn from your successes, I just think you learn MORE from your failures. Not automatically though! The problem I see with this notion of learning-from-successes is that you could have hit upon the right path by chance. While achieve success, you don’t really get to know of wrong paths (and there could be many of them) so there is every possibility you miss the right path when you try the same thing next time. However, when you fail, you analyze & understand the reasons, and then choose the right path. And that sticks with you – resulting in learning.

I think I personally learn MORE from failures than from successes. How about you?

The post Do You Learn More From Your Successes Than From Your Failures? (Please Opine) first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.