From the desk of Mr. Walters

Collaboration, it's one of the 21st century skills. There's pretty much unanimous agreement among policy-makers, academic thinkers, and business leaders that collaboration must be a crucial part of our classrooms. Incidentally, there is almost unanimous agreement among teachers and students that group work is painful, cumbersome, annoying, and largely counter-productive. Even popular reality  shows rely on group assignments to weed out contestants and create unnecessary drama. Why is something that is so important and crucial to our survival, so painful and dreadful? How can we make it more awesome? What do we do with collaboration? Part 1: Why you hate group work. Before our winter holiday break, I informally polled students in my classes. In all of my sections but one, 100% of my students noted that they hate doing group work. In one class two students said that they love group assignments because they can usually con their group mates into doing all of the work. Wh...

Last week, Dr. Justin Marquis mentioned on Twitter that this coming week's # GBLFriday topic would be, How Games Help Students Learn Failure. Failure is a topic I've been thinking a lot about lately and hitting on in previous posts. Alas, I have decided to to tackle this topic a bit here and put in my two cents worth... Failure shouldn't be fatal   There are a lot of popular articles out there that say students should be failing regularly in school and activities (just Google "failure good for kids" or something similar), that point to various studies into the benefits of failure. My conservative crotchety old windbag friends love these articles. The driving idea is that children benefit from plenty of experiences with frustration, failure and defeat. Without a doubt, this will motivate them to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" and try even harder the next time. It will give them grit and prepare them for the "Real World...