… failure is as important as success …
In recent years, a significant thread in educational research around achievement has emerged and it is something that, back when I was in “teacher school” we never discussed.
As educators, the theory holds, we should encourage our students to fail. We should create conditions in which it is safe for them to fail. We should challenge them to attempt things at which we know they will fail.
Fail early and avoid the rush is a paraphrase of something my father would have said. He would have loved this idea.
When I was learning to be a teacher, failure was not thought of as a function of success. My education classes would, likely, have hammered home strategies to specifically avoid failure.
It turns out that failure is as important as success in development of a growth mindset.
I find that this idea is challenging for many educators to grasp. For many, this is a revolutionary thought. The concept of linking failure to success was outside-the-box thinking. The idea that failure was anything but, well, failure is 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.
However, we are called to create conditions for our students where failure is okay, where mistakes are 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 is 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.
Accorting to Irish dramatist Samuel Beckett we should “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Well said, sir. 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.