Teach & Serve III, No. 37 – Fail Better
April 25, 2018
This is what we are called to do: create conditions around us where failure is okay, where challenge is rewarded, where missing the mark is celebrated as a necessary and critical step towards making it.
There is a significant and important thread in current research around achievement and it is something that, back when I was in “teacher school” we never discussed. We would not have thought about it as a function of success and we would, likely, have attempted to create strategies to avoid it.
It is the idea that failure is as important as success in development of a growth mindset.
A few years ago, this was a revolutionary thought and the concept of linking failure to success was outside-the-box thinking. The idea that failure was anything but, well, failure was tough to grasp. Let us be honest: in our work in schools where we pin much (too much) of our opinion on of success on scaled benchmarks and grades and academic achievement and where we as professionals are all-too-often assessed on how our students do, the idea that failure is a good thing can be a difficult sell. More challenging still is the growing understanding that excellent educational leaders create conditions in which failure is planned for, is monitored and is celebrated.
This is the current, best practice research. This is what we are called to do: create conditions around us where failure is okay, where challenge is rewarded, where missing the mark is celebrated as a necessary and critical step towards making it.
Educational leaders understand that this idea applies not only to student mastery work in classrooms, but it also applies to staff work as they attempt new things. Too often we believe that teachers should be able to implement new plans, programs and technologies without a hitch and that growing pains are signs that teachers are not trying hard enough or that professional development around a given topic was lacking. Too infrequently do we build in time to fail and less frequently still do we highlight failures as good steps on the road to successes.
This is not how we have been wired.
“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” said Samuel Beckett and can we give the guy a little credit for being way ahead of his time on this?
It is time to rewire. It is time to acknowledge and celebrate failure. It is time to fail better.