Failure or Mistake?

This week’s article summary from the Washington Post is Why Have So Many Accepted the Idea That kids Need to Fail More.

The article focuses  on the difference between using the word failure versus mistake in the classroom. 

As I read the article I found myself in the camp that prefers the word mistake to failure as kids might interpret failure as a hopeless negative, rather than as an incremental step toward accomplishment and success.

Regardless of which word you prefer to use in your classroom, we all want progress and learning for and from our students. 

When it’s all said and done, it is less about the words we use and more about the classroom climate we create that encourages and supports students to see failure or mistakes as opportunities and inevitable parts of the learning process.

Joe

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Is it important to allow students to fail in class — or not to fail? How much should teachers allow kids to struggle before helping them solve a problem or understand a concept? These may seem like simple questions, but the answers are complex.

A Texas high school teacher wrote in her blog that she has a large quote on the wall above the whiteboard that says, “In this class, failure is not an option. It’s a requirement.” As she blogged,  "As my students started to learn that first day, I have this quote hanging in my classroom, not because I have a desire to see any of my students fail the class, but as a constant reminder of the powerful learning that occurs when people have to (or are given the opportunity to) struggle through challenging material and fail a few times along the way."

A California teacher has a different take, writing that there is a big difference between failing and making mistakes and that it is important for teachers to help students understand the difference. He wrote: "Failure for a student, I would suggest, is the experience of not making progress towards their key hopes and dreams. One of the many jobs we teachers have, then, is to help them see that challenges they might face are just mistakes, which the dictionary defines as 'an error in action, calculation, opinion, or judgment caused by poor reasoning, carelessness, insufficient knowledge, etc.' Mistakes are things that students can fix — with support — in a reasonable amount of time and without an unreasonable amount of effort."