You've Got to Fail
The importance of failure to learning
In this last month of summer, we thought we’d write some articles about ways to help our children (and ourselves 🙂) get ready for the new school year! Our first article was on using a schedule as a parenting tool. Our second described how parents can teach their children cognitive behavioral therapy as a tool for dealing with emotions. Our third discussed helping our children with their math and science homework. Our fourth article encouraged us to grow in the ability to be flexible.
In this fifth and final article before the school year kicks off in earnest, we wanted to focus in a little more on the importance of welcoming failure when learning.
None of us like to fail. Failure can bring frustration, disappointment, anxiety, and self-doubt. And, there are certainly times of crisis when we need to have an attitude that, “Failure is not an option.”
But, when it comes to learning, failure is an integral part of the process. At the very least, all learning starts with us becoming aware of and accepting our ignorance. If we don’t believe we lack knowledge or a skill, how can we ever learn? Why would we expend the time and energy to learn anything if we believe we already know everything?
Beyond accepting our initial ignorance, the acceptance of failure is vital throughout the learning process. Jenny Anderson’s Wall Street Journal article, “Don’t Try to Rescue Your Kid from the ‘Learning Pit’” (free sign-in or subscription required) describes how important it is for students to go through a “learning pit,” where they feel a little in-over-their-heads. But, while they’re in that pit, they struggle with the material and ways of learning that material, which results in learning.
We see this when our children first learn to walk. They wobble, stumble, and fall, but their bodies wouldn’t learn how to take steps if they were never allowed to fall. We put padding on sharp furniture, to prevent serious injury, but we let them take those steps on their own and let them fall.
When our children are older, well-meaning parents sometimes try to prevent their children from “falling down,” from struggling in the learning pit. As Anderson writes, quoting British teacher James Nottingham, who coined the learning pit idea:
Nottingham says there are three mental states kids occupy when they are learning something new: relatively comfortable, relatively uncomfortable and panicked. Too often parents step in at relatively uncomfortable. “It’s counterproductive,” he said in an interview. “Struggle is where we learn.”
To use our toddler analogy again, preventing our children from wallowing in panic is akin to putting on padding on sharp furniture when our children first learn to walk. We need to do that. Letting them stumble and fall is akin to letting them be relatively uncomfortable in the learning pit. We need to do that too.
As a teacher, because I care so much about welcoming failure when learning, I almost always share the following story on the first day of class. I heard this story years ago in a lecture on CD and no longer remember who the speaker was nor whom the speaker was quoting. I also don’t remember why he told this story, but I thought the story so helpful for my purposes that I repurposed it. Here’s my telling:
There once was an educational psychologist from New York City who went to Japan to visit their schools and observe their classes. When he entered his first classroom, the students were already working on a problem, so he sat down and observed the students. As is typical, he saw some students were struggling with the problem while others were getting the answer without difficulty.
After a little while, the teacher asked for a student to come and show the class his/her solution. Interestingly, noted the psychologist, the teacher called on one of the students who was struggling with the problem. In the U.S., the person who usually is called to the front of the class to show a solution is a student who solved the problem without difficulty, so the psychologist thought this was odd.
The teacher asked the student to write his answer on the board, which the student did. Then the teacher asked the class, “Is this correct?” The student’s classmates all shook their heads. The teacher then asked the student, “Please erase your solution and work it again on the board.” So, the student erased his answer and wrote a new solution.
When the student was done, the teacher asked the class again, “Is this correct?” The student’s classmates all shook their heads again. The teacher told the student, “Please work it again on the board.”
This happened over and over again. The student would write a solution, the teacher would ask the class if this was correct, the class would say, “No,” and the teacher would ask the student to write the solution again.
The psychologist was stunned. How many years of therapy would this poor student have to go through in the future because of this public shaming?
Again and again this continued. Write a solution, is this correct, write it again. Finally, the student wrote a solution, the teacher asked the class if it was correct, and all his classmates nodded their heads, “Yes,” then burst into applause. The student beamed, and his teacher said, “Good job! You can return to your seat.”
Why do I tell this story? Because I want my students to see that in that Japanese classroom, everyone—from the teacher to the students—understood that failure was necessary to learning. None of the people in that classroom bought into the notion that failure while learning was something to avoid, to run away from, to fear. Every single child and adult believed that it was normal and natural to fail while learning and acted accordingly. In my own classroom, I want myself and all my students to nurture and support one another to have this same mindset.
As we start this new school year, let’s help our children grow in their ability to handle failure while learning. We can let our children struggle a little longer than we might feel comfortable with and encourage them that they’ll get through this okay, that it’s normal to feel uncomfortable and uneasy as you’re learning, and that you’ll walk through this with them. With months and years of repetition, and the accumulated experience of their own experiences of getting through the learning pit, our children will grow in their ability to walk with failure.
What ways have you found you or your children avoiding failure when learning? How do you or your children work around that? Please include them in the comments below!
Author: Johnny Lin. Thanks for comments from Karen Lin!
