An 11th Grade Teacher Gives Inspiring TED Talk about Learning From Mistakes

Diana Laufenberg teaches 11th-grade American History at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, and she has given a recent TED talk about learning from mistakes that she has learned from her time as a teacher.

She is a huge advocate of steering away from standardized tests and instead backing interactive learning that includes failure.

Here are some great quotes from her talk:

“To tell kids to never be wrong, to ask them to always have the right answer, doesn’t allow them to learn.”

“[The assignment] allowed them to fail, process, learn more… Learning has to include an amount of failure, because failure is instructional in the process.”

“If we continue to look at education as if it’s about coming to school to get the information and not about experiential learning empowering student voice and embracing student failure, we are missing the mark.”

“We won’t get [to the next step in education] with the standardized test, and we wont get there with the one right answer. We know better, and it’s time to do better.”

Watch her compelling TED talk in its entirety here.