The first time I introduced the concept of subject-verb agreement to my Class 7 students, it was a classic case of what I now understand as "unproductive success." The textbook's approach was a predictable, formulaic list of rules: "Singular subject takes a singular verb," "Plural subject takes a plural verb," and so on. We spent a week drilling the rules, doing worksheets, and correcting sentences. The students, diligent and eager to please, learned the rules and applied them with remarkable accuracy on their tests. I felt a sense of triumph—they had "gotten it."
Yet, a week later, when they were asked to write a short story, the same errors reappeared. Sentences like, "The boys plays in the park" and "The cat run fast" were scattered throughout their writing. The knowledge hadn't stuck; it was just a temporary, performance-based understanding. My initial "success" was a shallow one, a mere memorisation of rules that didn't transfer to real-world application. It was a classic "failure" in the sense that Manu Kapur describes: the absence of a genuine struggle to build deeper understanding.
Inspired by Kapur's work, I decided to embrace this failure productively. I realised my previous mistake was in giving them the solution (the rules) before they had even identified the problem. The next day, I didn't mention any rules at all. Instead, I presented them with a challenge.
I wrote a series of sentences on the board, some correct and some intentionally wrong. For example:
The birds sings in the morning.
My mother cook a delicious meal.
They are my best friends.
She is my sister.
I then divided the class into small groups and told them, "Your job is to figure out what's wrong with some of these sentences and why. There are no rules in the textbook to help you with this. You have to figure out the pattern on your own. Talk to each other, look at the words, and see what you notice."
Initially, there was a quiet murmur of confusion. The students were accustomed to being given the answer, rather than discovering it. This was the "productive failure" phase: a moment of cognitive struggle and perplexity. Some students were quick to point out that "sings" in the second sentence sounded wrong." Others noticed the pattern of an "s" at the end of the verb in some sentences but not others. A few groups even started making their own incorrect guesses, which I encouraged as part of the process. I moved between the groups, gently prompting them without giving away the answers. "What's different about 'boy' and 'birds'? What's different about the person who is 'my mother' and 'they'?"
This open-ended, exploratory phase was rich with peer interaction and active struggle. It was a space for them to fail—to propose an incorrect rule or make an inaccurate observation—and then correct themselves through discussion with their peers. This wasn't about right or wrong answers yet, but about the active process of problem-solving and pattern recognition.
After a good 15 minutes of this productive struggle, I brought the class together. One group's spokesperson, a girl named Leena, bravely stood up and presented their hypothesis: "We think that if the first word is just one person or one thing, the verb has an 's' at the end. But if it's more than one, it doesn't." Another student, Akash, added, "And for 'is' and 'are', 'is' is for one person, and 'are' is for many."
At that moment, the textbook's rules didn't need to be memorised; they were discovered. The students had, through their own struggle and collaboration, constructed the rules themselves. Now, when I introduced the formal terminology like "singular" and "plural" and the concept of subject-verb agreement, it wasn't a foreign concept. It was a label for a pattern they had already identified and understood.
The retention and application were far more robust this time. When they wrote their next stories, the grammatical errors were significantly fewer. And when they did make a mistake, they could often self-correct because they had an intuitive feel for the concept, not just a memorised rule. This classroom experience validated the core premise of Kapur's work. By allowing students to struggle with a problem and "fail forward" into a solution, we empower them to build a deep, lasting understanding. The "failure" was the very ground upon which authentic learning was built.
