“Fail” Is Not A Four Letter Word!

Here are two true stories for you:

Story 1

Every September, at the start of the year, we tell our Robotics students that they are going to fail. Over and over. We tell them that we expect failure. We even encourage it. You can’t fail without trying and when we try, we learn. One of the students took this so seriously that for the first few weeks, he came up to me at the end of each class and excitedly told me how he had failed and we would both celebrate. Eventually, the failures turned into discoveries and those led to a working robot!

Story 2

Every time I teach little people how to code, we talk about how sometimes we get stuck on a problem and we can’t figure it out so we try again and again. And every time we try our brain makes little connections. The more connections we make, the stronger our brain gets. So, when one of the grommets gets stuck and we puzzle out the solution, we celebrate! Our brains just got stronger!

What these stories have in common (and what many adults both inside and outside of education have forgotten) is that failure is not necessarily a bad thing. Not many of us are able to do something the first time we try it. We often fail. Sometimes spectacularly. It’s not a comfortable feeling but it is so important to learn to push through that discomfort, to persevere until we reach success. We all know that feeling of trying to do something, over and over until suddenly…things work and it all makes sense! What a wonderful way to feel. And to learn.

As an educator, it is our job to challenge our students. To put them into that place of discomfort, where failure is a very real possibility. For each student, that is going to look slightly different. It is also our job to scaffold learning so that no student spends too much time in failure. A little success goes a long ways – too much failure can be disheartening!

So, whether the task is mastering the alphabet, programming a robot, learning to hit a baseball or solving a complex math problem, helping our students move through failure to learning is an important part of what we do. How did you “fail” to learn today?