\n<\/p>\n
Be it a bombed reading quiz or a botched science experiment, at some point every student fails in school. But students with a greater fear of failure are more likely to interpret normal academic challenges as severe and have less capacity to cope with academic stress. <\/p>\n
In the last few years, educators Jennifer Boogaart in Arkansas, Alicia Wiechert in Illinois, and Doreen Kelleher in Massachusetts have all noticed a noticed a significant rise in perfectionism among their elementary students\u2014a \u201ckind of a mini-pandemic,\u201d said Boogaart, a K-5 gifted enrichment teacher at John Tyson Elementary School of Innovation in Springdale, Ark. A rising social media focus on \u201ccurating\u201d children\u2019s activities to focus only on success and accomplishments exacerbates the problem, they say..<\/p>\n
\u201cAs parents, teachers, coaches, I think we all try to protect kids from failing\u2014we try to get them exact directions to follow and so on\u2014but by doing this, we\u2019re preventing kids from failing and learning from their mistakes,\u201d said Wiechert, a K-4 library and information specialist at Ramona Elementary School in Wilmette, Ill. <\/p>\n
That\u2019s why the three educators are now deliberately introducing students to failure as part of a larger goal of showing them how to reduce stress and gain academic resilience. <\/p>\n
Boogaart, Wiechert, and Kelleher, a 4th grade teacher at Proctor Elementary School in Topsfield, Mass. are among 50 teachers nationwide piloting \u201cLet Me Fail,\u201d a program developed by entrepreneurship educators Lowey Bundy Sichol, author of the children\u2019s series, From an Idea to …, and Chic Thompson, executive director of What a Great Idea (WAGI) Labs, a nonprofit social incubator group for kids\u2019 ideas. Students in the program read and discuss setbacks in the lives of successful inventors and businesses. The teachers also held \u201cFailure Fridays\u201d and longer events in which students tackled difficult, iterative projects and discussed how they learned from multiple attempts.<\/p>\n
\u201cTeachers are setting the classroom culture around failure, and it\u2019s important that they are de-stigmatizing the word\u2014positioning an action as a failure, not the student as a failure,\u201d said Kathyrn Bateman, an assistant education professor at Penn State Harrisburg. <\/p>\n
Bateman is not part of the Let Me Fail project, but works with teachers in the Northeast to develop K-8 engineering lessons in which students \u201cflip failure\u201d by analyzing testing data, finding creative solutions to problems, and improving designs.<\/p>\n
When Boogaart asked her students to make paper airplanes from scratch, without directions, and let themselves fail, she got a \u201cclass full of blank stares.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were like, \u2018You want us to not do good?\u2019\u201d recalled Boogaart. \u201cAnd I said yes. … I just talked to them about how mistakes aren\u2019t failures. They make you more creative and smarter and unstoppable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Boogaart\u2019s classes went through multiple rounds of attempting to build their airplanes and reflecting on what went wrong. In the first few rounds of reflection, she said, students tended to focus on their feelings of frustration, anger, or insecurity. But after a few more attempts, students\u2019 reflections turned more to diagnosing their mistakes and brainstorming ways to improve. <\/p>\n
This iterative learning can both build student resilience and memory, according to Thompson, a former designer for Disney. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I failed and then learned how to do something that worked, I remembered it,\u201d he said. \u201cFailure anchors learning for me, where just reading about it and raising my hand never did.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wiechert introduced one 4th grade class to thinking about failure in a social studies lesson using \u201copposite brainstorming.\u201d Students created the \u201cworst possible treehouse,\u201d then talked through why different pieces would be problematic and how to improve the design. \u201cIt got them to think about ideas they wouldn\u2019t have thought about,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The project proved so popular last year that the school has planned a full day of designed-to-fail activities this year as part of the science curriculum for all 4th graders.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s important, however, not to \u201ccheerlead\u201d or romanticize failure, said Matthew Johnson, an associate teaching professor at the Penn State College of Education, who studies teacher feedback. <\/p>\n
When students struggle or make mistakes on an assignment or project, Johnson found teachers often focus on managing students\u2019 frustration or giving the correct answer rather than asking them to rethink their work.<\/p>\n
\u201cTeachers have to worry about getting through this huge amount of stuff, and so a lot of times their response is like, \u2018OK, move on. We\u2019ve got to go,\u2019\u201d Johnson said. But, \u201cif failure is the end point, it\u2019s not a good thing. Helping kids to identify what didn\u2019t work, why it didn\u2019t work, and then giving them space to think through how to make it better is super important.\u201d<\/p>\n
Boogaart agreed that time\u2014or lack thereof\u2014is a factor in why perfectionism seems to have expanded. \u201cWe just don\u2019t have time to go back and fix mistakes,\u201d she noted. She has started saving more time after every assignment for students to think through their mistakes and ways to avoid them in the future.<\/p>\n
Kelleher, the Massachusetts 4th grade teacher, now keeps a \u201cfailure wall\u201d in which students can post mistakes and what they learned from them.<\/p>\n
\u201cI saw so much growth in the kiddos, especially the ones that before, couldn\u2019t put a pen to paper because they were so fearful … that\u2019s not good enough,\u201d Kelleher said. \u201cI just wanted to break through that mindset and say, \u2018see, it\u2019s OK. Actually, this mistake is going to teach us something.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Since starting to actively discuss and practice failure in her classes, Boogaart said she has seen a huge difference in students\u2019 willingness to get started on a challenging assignment because now, \u201cThey know it\u2019s fine,\u201d she said. \u201c\u2018I\u2019m going to fail, but I\u2019m going to come out on the other side of this.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Be it a bombed reading quiz or a botched science experiment, at some point every student fails in school. But students with a greater fear of failure are more likely to interpret normal academic challenges as severe and have less capacity to cope with academic stress. In the last few years, educators Jennifer Boogaart in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23569,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[350,7782,678],"class_list":{"0":"post-23568","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-fail","9":"tag-resilient","10":"tag-students"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23568\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}