Is there one right answer?

Whilst I was marking my Unit 2 Biology SAC on Behavioural Adaptations, I started to notice the amount of feedback I was leaving for my students. I saw a trend, if the answer was correct a simple tick was given if the answer was incorrect there was usually a couple of sentences written about the correct answer. But what was the correct answer, and what gave me the right to deem an answer correct or incorrect? Obviously, in an education system there has to be a 'right' and a 'wrong' for students to progress through their school life,  but is there one right answer? To put it simply, no.

Allowing students to fail, and being ok with that, is apart of the learning process. We are dealing with a culture that has an infatuation with one right answer, however what do we learn from this? To tell students to never be wrong or to ask them to always have the right answer doesn't encourage them to learn. Instead, it encourages them to be passive learners.

At Nossal Secondary College we completed a SAC for Biology where the students made a poster about the biogeochemical cycles (water, carbon or nitrogen). My supervisor had suggested to me that we could use a double lesson to create a 'gallery' of the posters and students can visit and critique their peers. Thinking about this, I was slightly tentative about the suggestion. Does it encourage the idea of failure, and that one students poster is better or worse than another? In the end the gallery went ahead. To promote discussion, I asked the students 'who has the best poster?' and immediately they all pointed to the most visual poster in the room (refer to picture). The next question was 'why do you think it's the best?' with responses such as the design is great, there's lots of colour, it's set out well and I like the pictures. The students were suggesting all visual features. Next, I asked the students to read the information and they could see some of the information written was flawed. Then we went to a different poster, who's visual and layout wasn't as great but the written information was fantastic. After the students had wandered around the gallery, we spent some time discussing the learning process. The students could see that it wasn't about who's poster was perfect, or what I, as the teacher, could create. It was about what they could create themselves and this may have involved failure, processing information and learning from their mistakes. So when we do another poster or visual assessment later in the year they will do better as learning has to include a dash of failure. Failure is instructional.

If we continue to look at education as if it's about coming to school to get the information and not about experimental learning and embracing failure we are missing the point. An educational culture of one right answer and standardised testing will not achieve educational goals. Education must be better than this.