Experiences of failure can provide valuable opportunities to learn, however, the typical classroom does not tend to function from an orientation of learning from failure. Rather, educators aim to teach accurate information as efficiently as possible, with the main goal for students to be able to produce correct knowledge when called for, in the classroom and beyond. Alternatively, teaching for failure requires instructional designs that function out of a different paradigm altogether. Failures can occur during activities like problem solving, problem posing, idea generation, comparing/contrasting cases, or inventing formalisms or pattern-based rules. We present findings from a study done in fourth-grade classes on environmental sustainability that used a design allowing for failures to occur during collaboration. These center on dialogs that included “micro-failures,” where we could address how students deal with failure during the process of learning. Our design drew from “productive failure,” where students are given opportunities to fail at producing canonical concepts before receiving explicit instruction, and unscripted collaborative learning, where students engage in collaboration without being directed in specific dialogic moves. By focusing on failures during an unscripted collaborative process, our work achieved two goals: (1) We singled out occurrences of failure by analyzing students’ dialogs when they encountered impasses and identified several behaviors that differentially related to learning; (2) We explored how the form of task design influences the collaborative learning process around failure occurrences, showing the potential benefits of more structured tasks.

失败的经历可以提供宝贵的学习机会，但是，典型的教室并不倾向于以从失败中学习为导向。相反，教育者的目的是尽可能高效地教授准确的信息，其主要目标是使学生能够在课堂上及课外需要时产生正确的知识。或者，失败教学需要完全根据不同范式运作的教学设计。在诸如解决问题，提出问题，产生想法，比较/对比案例或发明形式主义或基于模式的规则之类的活动中，可能会发生故障。我们提出了一项关于环境可持续性的四年级研究的结果，该研究使用的设计允许在协作期间发生故障。这些以包含“微故障”的对话框为中心，在这里我们可以解决学生在学习过程中如何处理故障。我们的设计源于“生产性失败”，即在给予明确指导之前，学生有机会失败地提出规范的概念；以及无脚本的协作学习，即学生在没有特定对话动作指导的情况下进行协作。通过集中精力于无脚本协作过程中的失败，我们的工作实现了两个目标：（1）通过分析学生在遇到僵局时的对话，找出失败的发生，并找出与学习有差异的几种行为；（2）我们探索了任务设计的形式如何影响围绕失败发生的协作学习过程，