Something Wicked This Way Comes

If you live on the East coast of the United States, the term “wicked” (pronounced “wickit” is you’re familiar with the regional diction) means something “good”.  In the TPACK sense, wicked is meant to represent ideas that can be troublesome and require perseverance to overcome.  Wicked problems don’t necessarily have a solution, but there are dynamic ways of working through them to reduce their wickedness.

As educators we must rethink our teaching, learn from our failures, and scale innovation in our schools.  Between myself and 4 other classmates in the MAET CEP 812 class, we explored the problems and solutions as we looked at ways we can use failure as a learning opportunity.  We started by identifying specifics about the wicked problem and attempted to identify why it is difficult to incorporate these meaningful opportunities into the classroom.

The task challenged us to research why we perceive failure as something bad, just as we don’t have to use the word wicked in a negative way.  If we consider ways we can use wicked problems to challenge us, we can’t help but grow.  As a society, we are afraid of failure.  Down to the very nature of our evolution as mammals we are afraid of failure.  Yet failure will happen within any given lifetime.  So why not become resilient and learn from it.  As educators, we are obligated to provide students with meaningful opportunities to experience failure in an environment safe from judgement, but full of critique and reflection.  If we get down to the meat of the problem, we see we have a choice to embrace or reject failure.

image credit: Tomasz Stasiuk



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