This was it. I stood, sweaty and exhausted, as my band director walked over to the group of potential drum major candidates standing at the center of the field. Six of us had just endured a grueling tryout for the past hour and a half, but only one would be selected to be drum major for the 2009 marching band season. Having held the position the previous year, I felt I had a leg up, but the competition was stiff and I knew I couldn’t expect anything. Thirty seconds later I was told that I would not be retaining my position as drum major, and that someone else would take on the role for the upcoming year.
Like it or not, we will all fail in our lives. I failed in my quest to become drum major. I’ve failed tests, job interviews, auditions, and, as a teacher, I fail more times a day than I care to admit. But I’m also a firm believer that failure can and should be viewed as an opportunity rather than a road block. When we fail, we have the opportunity to pick ourselves up and learn how to move past it.
Given my belief in the power of failure, however, I’m often disturbed by the current trend that refuses to allow students to fail and thereby deprives them of the important opportunity to learn how to fail successfully while they are still young. The pressure to refuse to allow students to fail comes from all sides—from school districts, administrators, parents, and even students themselves. Districts set artificial grade floors so that students cannot fall below a certain point. Parents turn on teachers if their child receives a low grade on the report card. Under fire from the districts, administrators pressure teachers to give extra credit and makeup work or, at worst, to change grades themselves. There’s even a movement now to opt out of testing across the country, and a part of their rational is because too many students will fail. And through all this we send our kids the last message we should be sending them: that you can’t and shouldn’t fail.
By refusing to allow our students to fail, we fail them in the long run. When they get to college, nobody will be as forgiving to them as we’ve been. Grade floors disappear. Parents can’t pressure professors as easily as they do teachers, and administrators won’t be as ready to pressure professors to change a poor grade. As a result, our kids will experience failure for the first time alone and with no support mechanisms. And if they somehow make it through college, the real world awaits. What happens when they fail at job interviews? When they get laid off that first time? When they don’t have enough money to pay the rent? Nobody is going to get them out of it then, and they won’t know how to fail successfully and pick themselves back up. We will then have to confront the fact that we have created a generation of people that expects success and don’t know what to do when they fail.
Some researchers have given a name to the trait we empower our students to develop through failure: grit. Angela Duckworth, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, defines grit as the tendency to sustain interest and effort toward very-long-term goals through both successes and failures. Those who study grit have demonstrated its importance to success in just about everything, from excelling at West Point to achievement in spelling bees to success in novice teachers. But left unsaid is the fact that if we don’t allow people to fail, they will never learn how to pick themselves back up and develop higher levels of grit.
With this in mind, I believe that we need a new paradigm for the way we handle failure in our public education system. We need to acknowledge the necessity of failure in the learning process and communicate to students that the most important thing about failing is what you do afterward. If a child fails a test, a class, or a grade, our response should be to embrace that failure and talk about how to move on from it. We should counsel them on what went wrong and what can be done to improve the next time. In the long run, this will empower students to move on from failures and experience more and more success. But our last reaction should be to play the blame game or look to offer students a way out of their failure. Doing this only sends the message that failure is something painful without any benefits and does nothing to prepare them for the real world, a place where they will fail constantly in big and small ways.
I say this with a caveat: failure can be a crippling experience if handled poorly. I’m not advocating that we simply let students fail with no safety net in place, because in the long run, this would be as damaging as shying away from failure all together. But if embraced and used as a learning tool with the proper support from peers and teachers, failure is a powerful opportunity to strengthen the individual. I believe that my own failures—such as my failed second attempt at becoming drum major—made me a stronger human being and equipped me with a capacity to handle the many failures I, and every other teacher, experience daily. I learned that failure isn’t the end and that even in failure you can still create much good.
It may sound counter-intuitive, but we need to give our kids this same experience. We need to allow them to fail so that they learn how to pick themselves up again, learn from the experience, and move on. In refusing to allow our kids to fail now, we’ll only fail them later.
This post originally appeared on TeacherPop on Thursday, April 17th.
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Categories: Jon Alfuth, Tales from the Classroom, Writers
At what age do you suggest we allow them to feel like failures at a subject as important as reading? Research suggests that in the early grades, we MUST NOT send the message that they are poor readers.
I think you’re missing the point. We do not want students to “feel like failures.” What we DO want them to understand is that failure is a part of life and that the act of failing does NOT make them a failure. The most important thing is that when they fail (which they will) they learn to pick themselves up again and move on without labeling themselves as failures. I purposely didn’t address the timing or methodology for doing so because that was not the focus of this particular piece.
At what age, I ask again? Please read the research : In the early grades, children must never feel the way you are suggesting. That research was the basis for not mandating standardized tests in grades K-2 — that was the reason Tennessee has traditionally tested children starting only in grade 3.
The research and children’s brain development have not changed — so why do the Common Core supporters advocate changing these practices?
This piece has nothing to do with common core (I didn’t even mention it in the piece so I’m not sure where you’re getting that from) and everything to do with the fact that we fail all the time in our lives. We need to learn how to do so and still pick ourselves up and succeed. If we don’t prepare them for this then we’re crippling them for life. Now if research suggests we need to take a measured an incremental approach as students get older that’s fine, but that’s not what I was addressing in my piece. This is also about failure in general and not about specific polices (testing, etc.) so again, not sure where you’re drawing those assertions from.
Please also note this snippet from the end of the piece: “I’m not advocating that we simply let students fail with no safety net in place, because in the long run, this would be as damaging as shying away from failure all together. But if embraced and used as a learning tool with the proper support from peers and teachers, failure is a powerful opportunity to strengthen the individual.”
“There’s even a movement now to opt out of testing across the country, and a part of their rational is because too many students will fail. And through all this we send our kids the last message we should be sending them: that you can’t and shouldn’t fail.”
This movement started gaining momentum in New York State last year, when parents saw what the new Common Core tests there were doing to their children in terms of test anxiety and excessive stress.
Regardless, do you agree or disagree that we set our kids up for future failure by refusing to allow them to fail now and robbing them of the chance to know how? That’s what’s happened with legacy-MCS’ no fail grades 1-5 policy.
If all you do us fixate on a couple dozen word reference in an 800 word piece you’re kind of missing the overarching point. This is not a piece about testing its a piece about failure in general and how we handicap our kids by refusing to ever allow them to fail in any way.
I think we should model our K-2 education (and that is what I will focus on because I am a K-2 educator) on the education given to the children of the rich. Look at where Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, Kevin Huffman and Michelle Rhee, and President Obama have sent their children. No, they do not allow them to know that they have failed in the K-2 grades at those schools. All children deserve what the children of the rich have now.
I read an interesting book recently BT Malcolm gladwell where he actually noted that the children of the very rich have a high frequency of slipping out of the 1%, precisely because they don’t learn how to struggle for what they have. Not a uniform problem, but it does suggest that even the education given to the rich might be missing something. Closer to hone, colleagues of mine that teach at MUS complain all the time about how parents expect high grades and blame others when the kids don’t get them. Again, great education, but doesn’t allow kids to fail by in large
I think in general this is an endemic problem regardless of income
I am referring to K-2 education of the children of the rich, which is exactly how I described. This is not an endemic problem regardless of income – do a little research into the schools the education “reformers” send their own children to, and you will see that it is just the opposite.
Please post some if you have any
From the Sidwell Friends website (where the Obama children go to school):
“At a time when academic achievement is increasingly defined by outside standard setters in
search of standardized metrics such as AP exams and SAT test scores, and“teaching to the test” leaves little time for deep original exploration of an issue by individual students, we believe that Sidwell Friends students should be provided a meaningful block of time prior to their graduation from Upper School to devote their undivided attention to the study of an issue or pursuit of a project that vitally engages them.”
http://www.sidwell.edu/about_sfs/long-range-priorities/index.aspx
I am happy to post more information as I find it. There is a lot of evidence to be found that “reformers” do not choose high-stakes tests (which frequently make children feel like failures) for their own children, particularly in the early grades.