How do you respond to failure in your classroom?
Our year always begins with a day with our student leaders. It is a day where we construct and set school wide goals for the year. On Leaders Day I play a You Tube Clip to our student leaders all about failure. Failure is something that many of them have not had to deal with. That’s not surprising. What is surprising is that all the great success stories, from Wayne Bennet to Graham Henry, Michael Jordan to Steve Jobs to Sir Peter Blake, are steeped in failure.
Most successful people will tell you that you absolutely must fail to succeed, and that failure is essential for development. Many great innovations were born out of failure. Failure is not bad, but rather something to be expected, embraced, and learned from.
I had been thinking that students’ intelligence is determined by how well they succeed, and those who fail are deemed inferior. Students are celebrated for their successes and punished, teased, or rejected for their failures. This ideal is promoted amongst our students from the age of five. It really worried me recently when I was in a Year 4 class where students preferred not to attempt the “harder” tasks because they would get it wrong.
Rarely, in a traditional classroom setting, is failure used as a pathway to innovation. We are setting our students up to enter the workforce having grown fearful of failure, believing that any failure will prove them worthless, and many workplaces prove them right. It is not only our students but also our staff are not encouraged to be innovative because of this fear. My question is how can we change the current cultural Mindset from the idea that failure equals bad?
Schools need to follow top sports teams and companies like Google, Toyota, Aon, the All Blacks, Team New Zealand, Apple and AIG failure is encouraged by highlighting the following to staff:
• They make sure people don’t feel the need to hide or cover up failures, because they make sure their staff know they won’t be fired for the failure—instead they understand that the more quickly they own their failure, the more quickly it can be learned from and built upon.
• They celebrate failures, sometimes as literal celebrations with beer and sometimes just as public opportunities to say “Great try! We’ve learned so much from this”.
• They actively practice a “no blame” culture, where those who make mistakes are not publicly shamed or blamed, but rather are seem as innovators or pioneers. Teams look collaboratively at the mistakes and what the next steps or are.
• They see mistakes or failures as just that—opportunities for something new or unexpected.
• They understand that if their team is actively trying things and failing, they will eventually discover something great.
Failure is a beginning not an ending.
It’s time to ask your staff: Do we advance failure in the classroom? How are we responding to this now? This week I will remind my staff and students alike that it is OK to FAIL.