Failure Is Not An Option...But It Should Be!

The ten­sion hangs in the air like wet snow on tree branches. Flight Direc­tor Gene Kranz lis­tens as his team tells him the com­mand mod­ule does not have enough air or power to return to Earth. In this scene from the movie Apollo 13, Ed Har­ris, play­ing Kranz, utters the now-​​famous line ver­bal­iz­ing what the team—and the audience—felt: “Fail­ure is not an option!” (Kranz, by the way, never actu­ally said those words, though he did bor­row them for the title of his memoir.)

The Apollo 13 astro­nauts of course made it back safely, and the intense search for solu­tions to impos­si­ble prob­lems still makes a riv­et­ing story.

In pub­lic edu­ca­tion today it often seems like we’re liv­ing this Hol­ly­wood scene. Fed­eral pol­icy man­dates that five years from now, one hun­dred per­cent of our chil­dren will meet grade level stan­dards in read­ing and math. Fail­ure is not an option. And why not? If you believe that all chil­dren can learn (and I do), what’s wrong with set­ting high expec­ta­tions for achieve­ment and doing every­thing we can to see that stu­dents meet those expectations?

There is plenty of debate about that very ques­tion, but that isn’t my focus here. What con­cerns me is how the expec­ta­tion of suc­cess and achieve­ment can get trans­lated at the class­room level. I fre­quently see this idea that fail­ure is not an option applied to daily assign­ments and tests. Teach­ers have no-​​tolerance poli­cies about missed home­work, for exam­ple, or grad­ing scales that doom stu­dents who do not pass every test.

This is par­tic­u­larly evi­dent with gifted stu­dents. I often hear both par­ents and stu­dents say that since these stu­dents are so capa­ble, any grade below a cer­tain level is unac­cept­able and likely means the stu­dent is sim­ply being lazy. The response is often puni­tive, requir­ing extra “make up” work or retests for par­tial credit.

It’s easy to for­get that gifted stu­dents may have the abil­ity to learn quickly and com­pre­hend at a deep, sophis­ti­cated level that other stu­dents don’t, but this doesn’t mean they already know every­thing or can do every­thing with­out instruc­tion and guidance.

It also doesn’t mean that a lack of suc­cess auto­mat­i­cally means a lack of effort. Young gifted chil­dren are used to suc­cess. Things come eas­ily to them, often auto­mat­i­cally, and they learn rapidly with­out even real­iz­ing they are learn­ing. With­out fail, though, every child hits a point where con­tent is beyond their abil­ity to absorb instantly, and they need to begin apply­ing con­scious thought and sys­tem­atic effort to their learning.

Most chil­dren reach this point early in life, often before school starts. They find out that some­times things don’t go right the first time, and they develop ways to cope with it, per­sist, and grow.

But gifted stu­dents may not reach that point until later, some­times not until mid­dle or even high school. When they finally do hit the wall, they often have no con­cept of what has hap­pened, and they don’t know how to respond.

It’s impor­tant for teach­ers to teach all stu­dents, and espe­cially the highly able ones, how to fail suc­cess­fully.

We can’t afford any longer to treat fail­ure like an end. Instead, we need to rethink it and con­sider it a begin­ning. I’ve writ­ten before about how to deal with per­fec­tion­ism, and those sug­ges­tions apply here as well. Here are a few other spe­cific things that teach­ers can do to cre­ate an envi­ron­ment that nur­tures learn­ing instead of sti­fling it:

• Rede­fine the word “mis­take.” In your class­room, a mis­take should always be an oppor­tu­nity for growth and learn­ing, never a fail­ure. Which nat­u­rally leads to
• Give sec­ond (and third and fourth) chances. Any stu­dent who does not achieve at the expected level should not be labeled as lazy or a fail­ure. Instead, give them the oppor­tu­nity to relearn and try again. School should be the one place where it is com­pletely safe to mess up over and over until you can get it right.
• Cel­e­brate growth. Instead of focus­ing only on accom­plish­ment, give every stu­dent the oppor­tu­nity to expe­ri­ence the plea­sure of suc­cess by redefin­ing it. Progress should be con­sid­ered suc­cess, not just ris­ing above a tar­get level.
• Reward effort. Giv­ing as much (if not more) atten­tion to stu­dents who work hard and take risks as to those who demon­strate more tra­di­tional types of suc­cess, we send the mes­sage that our class­rooms are a place for work­ing and try­ing, not just for accomplishment.
• Model fail­ure. By show­ing stu­dents how to deal with times they don’t meet their goals or expec­ta­tions, we give them tools to cope when it hap­pens to them. We also let them see that mis­takes and fail­ure are a nor­mal part of life.
• Set stu­dents up to fail some­times. Espe­cially with gifted chil­dren, there will be times that the more impor­tant les­son is how to recover from fail­ure rather than to expe­ri­ence suc­cess. Set stu­dents up to fail by giv­ing them a task they do not have the skill or knowl­edge to com­plete. Then help them pick them­selves up, think about what hap­pened, deter­mine what they need to do to suc­ceed, and walk them through that recov­ery process.

Try these in your class­room this year. Cre­ate a dif­fer­ent atmos­phere and see what hap­pens to atti­tudes and learning.

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Update: Thanks to Kevin Wash­burn who pointed me via Twit­ter to this post he wrote recently which sum­ma­rizes research sup­port­ing these ideas.