From Learned Helplessness to the Freedom to Fail

Last year, I taught 2nd grade. Throughout the year, I reflected on what was working and what wasn't working. This summer, I continued to do that, what could I do to make my classroom better? To make students more engaged? To optimize learning and success? No matter what aspect of my classroom I reflected on - student engagement, curriculum, technology, etc. - there was always an underlying "area that needs improvement". My students had learned helplessness. I do not take full credit for teaching them this, I believe that it was learned over many years. However, I definitely contributed. I think that there is so much pressure to get everything done, it is simply easier to just show them or tell them instead of guiding them, letting them fail, guiding them some more, and letting them figure it out.

When I attended ISTE this summer in Philadelphia, I attended a session by Andrew K. Miller called Freedom to Fail. At the largest international tech conference in the world, I took away the most impactful message from this session and it wasn't about tech at all for me. It was focused on teaching kids to fail forward, to change the negative connotation of the word FAIL to something that means needs more improvement, TRY AGAIN and KEEP TRYING! I came home and bought Andrew's book. Short, but great read. Here's the key points hat I took away from Andrew's book and will continue to revisit as I begin my first loop:

• When treated as a necessary step towards innovation, failure can help students to:
• Promote and establish a growth mindset,
• Build resiliency and a life-long learning mentality, and
• Prepare for the real world.
• Fear of failure is one of the leading causes of anxiety for students.
• Frame failure through a growth mindset.
• FAIL: First Attempt In Learning
• Failure is a beginning, not an end.
• If students are never given the opportunity to fail, they'll never know how much they can improve.
• By allowing and even prompting productive failure in the classroom, we can help students build their resiliency.
• When we fail in safe ways, we want to learn more.
• Students learn best through authentic experiences connected to the real world.
• Failure can only move students in the right direction if they have clear expectations and objectives, which are best established through rubrics and checklists and should be based on learning outcomes or standards.
• When students know that they'll be sharing their authentic products with an authentic audience, they will be motivated to continually revise their work as they make mistakes. Authenticity can create the need to improve work and , in the process, embrace the virtues of failure.
• This is one of the biggest problems with failure in the classroom: We set students up for epic fails before the have a chance to learn from the process. Instead, students need to be given multiple low stakes opportunities to fail, as these facilitate ongoing risk taking and impart to students the sense that failure isn't a big of a deal as they may think it is.
• Through the explicit teaching of questioning strategies, teachers can support students in moving past failure to success.
• A culture of collaboration must be sustained year-round if the freedom to fail is to be ingrained.
• Educators should model learning from failure as often as they can.
• Reflection focused on analyzing failure can help students to reframe it as a positive and meaningful experience.
• Consider using journals, discussions, and other reflection methods to facilitate failing forward.
• We all have students who tend to finish tasks early or who have some background knowledge that makes work a bit easier for them. We need to make sure that these students experience failure too. DIFFERENTIATE. Challenge them.
• Assessments that encourage the freedom to fail allow for student voice and choice and structured feedback.
• Smaller, targeted failures prevent students from becoming  overwhelmed and allow them to see failure as integral to the journey rather than simply the result of it.
• SMART Goals: Specific. Measurable. Attainable. Reasonable. Time-oriented.
• Students need specific, relevant, and timely feedback. We want students to think and reflect on their failures and reach an understanding of what happened and what to do next, and we want them to apply the feedback to their work immediately. Make sure feedback isn't overwhelming.
• Students should not be graded on their failures, no matter how important they are to eventual success. If students fail and receive a poor grade, they will think they are being punished for taking risks. Instead, teachers should sue grades to reward students at their best. Failure should be motivated by authentic learning and risk taking rather than by grades. 
• When we admit something isn't working, we communicate the message that failure is simply an opportunity to reflect and revise.

At our Open House, I will be sending a copy of my Philosophy on Failure to parents.