Learn From Failure

I had a lot of failures last week. Our flexible seating was not working for all of my students. I didn’t have a whiteboard. Our projector kept blacking out. One of my mini-lessons in Social Studies flopped. It felt like a LONG week!

John Spencer (2016) encourages us to see that failing is temporary and should be encouraged in a creative classroom. When you (or any of your students) think of yourself as a failure, you see it as a permanent character flaw. This stops the learning, which stops innovative thinking. In my classroom, I have been known to use the acronym F.A.I.L. (First Attempt in Learning) with students as a way for them to understand the importance of failing forward. Astro Teller believes that failing, when seen properly, is just a recognition of accelerated learning. Tim Brown from IDEO redefines the word altogether: “Don’t think of it as failure, think of it as designing experiments through which you’re going to learn” (Brown & Kātz, 2019). At IDEO they often say, “Fail early to succeed sooner.”

Photo by the blowup on Unsplash

Failure is an incredibly powerful learning tool for both teachers and students. Designing learning experiments, prototypes, and interactions and then testing them is at the heart of human-centered design. Up front, there is an understanding that not all of your ideas are going to work. It is important to discover the Achilles’ heel of any learning experience as quickly as possible so that you can pivot or move onto something else. As teachers try to disrupt traditional classroom practices with innovative learning experiences, they are bound to fail. The key is to learn something from every failure.

Public education needs a new relationship with experimentation and failure. “When experimentation is seen as necessary and productive, not as a frustrating waste of time, people will enjoy their work — even when it is confounding them” (Catmull, 2014, p. 113). Students can be confounding! Instead of getting frustrated and complaining, human-centered design thinking allows us to get excited when we are confronted with a challenge. Learning experiments become fact-finding missions that are celebrated in public education. Instead of relying on the traditional “best practices” of the past, teachers should be trusted to take risks. At Pixar, Ed Catmull understands the importance of establishing a culture of trust. “The antidote to fear is trust. There will always be plenty to be afraid of, especially when you are doing something new. Trusting others doesn’t mean that they won’t make mistakes. It means that if they do (or if you do), you trust they will act to help solve it. Fear can be created quickly; trust can’t” (Catmull, 2014). Teachers must be trusted to do their jobs and do them well. Afterall, teaching is a vulnerable profession and teachers have dedicated their lives to the craft of teaching students.

Having a human-centered design process for innovating in my classroom helps me embrace my failures along the way. Every failed learning experiment models this mindset for students and communicates to my students that they should not be held back by past failures. Tina Seelig, professor at the d.school has her students write a “failure resume” every semester that highlights their biggest mistakes. “Viewing their experiences through the lens of failure forces them to come to terms with the mistakes they have made along the way” (Seelig, 2009). I want model lifelong learning for our students. I do this by reframing my failures as learning experiments.

The more the better!

Failure Resources

Astro Teller: The unexpected benefit of celebrating failure

https://www.ted.com/talks/astro_teller_the_unexpected_benefit_of_celebrating_failure?language=en

The Secret Sauce of Silicon Valley by Tina Seelig

Pinkcast 1.12: Why you should write a failure resume.

I hope you all have a week filled with failure! Let me know how I can help you reframe your failures into learning experiments.

—Adrian