Revalidated learning for successful outcomes

MARKS ARE NO JOKE IN India. According to the India Consumer Survey 2013, middle class households spend an average of 10 percent of their monthly income paying school fees and towards private tuitions to improve their children™s exam scores, with the objective of ensuring their admission into top-ranked universities, and lifetime success. This is true of parents universally ” all of them want their children to succeed. Exams are considered a student™s horoscope of lifelong success. Therefore, failing an exam is a student™s worst nightmare, reflecting poorly on her family, school and teachers. Consequently, schools, teachers and parents are engaged in a charade that ensures children sail through education institutions year after year without learning much about or ever experiencing failure. The dimensions of this charade are reflected in the landmark Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009. S.16 of the Act explicitly states that œno child shall be held back in any class or expelled from school till the completion of elementary education. But the problem with such smooth sailing through the education lifecycle is that later in life when children experience failure as adults ” as is inevitable ” it becomes a crushing burden which can break them because they™ve never known how to cope with failure, learn from it, and move forward. To become a productive learning experience, failure does not have to occur in exams. For it to become a learning experience, it can occur in any structured format when solving a problem with an unclear solution, not unlike the promotional phase of a start-up business enterprise. Eric Ries is a Boston (USA)-based entrepreneur and speaker at global seminars, advisor to numerous start-ups and venture capitalists, and entrepreneur-in-residence at the Harvard Business School, USA. In his book, The Lean Startup, he writes, œWe are rehabilitating a concept I call validated learning. Validated learning is not after-the-fact rationalisation or a good story designed to hide failure. It is a rigorous method of demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty in which start-ups grow. Validated learning is the process of demonstrating empirically that a team has discovered valuable truths about a start-up™s present and future business prospects. It is more concrete, more accurate, and faster than market forecasting or classical business planning. It is the principal antidote to the lethal problem of achieving failure: successfully executing a plan that leads nowhere. Imagine if we replaced the word œstart-up with œstudent. The successfully executed plan that leads nowhere is what parents and students fear most ” an educational roadmap well-conceptualised in theory, with anecdotal past successes and enough cushions and stopgap solutions to rule out failure ” but leading nowhere. The inherent problem with such plans is that no plan is truly foolproof. The same lesson plan will not have an identical learning impact on 30 students. No recounted experience will identically influence a group of people. Unless we™re building a factory, it™s not natural to expect a lecture exposition or demonstration…