Cycle One: Interpretations of the Meaning and Causes of Failure

Failure. The very word can induce anxiety; cause my chest to tighten and my breath to speed up. Throughout my time in school the goal was always to get as many points as I possibly could on every assignment. Just the letter F inspired fear. The thought of seeing that letter, circled in red, on even one assignment terrified me. I couldn’t even think about failing a class. I was an A/B student. I didn’t get F’s. I was going to college and I wasn’t going to fail. End of story.

That was my life throughout high school. I can’t tell you a single thing I learned when I took advanced chemistry in 11^th grade, but I can tell you I got an A in the class. I don’t think I understood much of it, but I knew how to play the game and how to get the 90 something % on an assignment. The fear of failure was double sided. On the one hand, it got me though school. I graduated with a 3.9 gpa and a scholarship to college. That same fear also prevented me from really learning some of the subjects I studied because I was too scared to risk a lower grade for a shot at deeper understanding.

This fear of failure is prevalent throughout our society. Inside of schools we work to ward off failure. We have made failure into the ultimate negative. This mindset does not leave us room for multiple attempts at something or for trying something that may or may not work.  We have developed a culture of grade grabbing where students try to amass as many points as they possibly can on every assignment.  

I am now a teacher. It is my job to assess if students pass or fail. That is a power I have always felt uncomfortable with. I can tell you if my student made progress or not. I can tell you if their understanding and their skills have grown. But to say that they pass or that they fail. I struggle with that. If I have a student who goes from earning a 10% on a test to a 50%, I am technically supposed to say that he failed. But to me that’s not failure. The student made 40% growth; he in theory knows 40% than he did when he started. How can we call that failure?

So what is failure? Webster’s defines failure as a “lack of success.” A lack of success. Okay, that definition doesn’t sound so scary, so what’s so bad about failure? The phase “a lack of success” seems innocuous enough and it certainly doesn’t sound like something deserving of a panic attack. A lack of success seems like something you move though and then continue on. Failure sounds much more permanent.

Now, let’s go back to that student of mine from earlier. He went from a 10% to a 50%. Is that a lack of success? I don’t think so. He may not understand or be able to do all of it yet, but I would not call that a lack of success. I would call that progress.

Does this structure work? I don’t believe it does.  

Great discoveries and works throughout history have almost always, if not always, involved failure. How many inventions wouldn’t exist if someone out there was too afraid of failure to take a risk? How many books would not have been written, and songs not sung because someone gave up at the first sign of failure?

What are our students missing while they try to accumulate points? What are our students not learning? There are a wide variety of studies and articles that show that failure enhances learning. I’m not going to make that point here, if you want to read if you can check out Failure Is Essential to Learning or The Benefits of Failure.

So how can we take that and apply it to the context of our schools? How can we provide our students the chance to fail without “failing.” How can we give them those opportunities in a system that grades everything they do?

Giving them this is not simple, tweak one thing kind of work.  To make this work for our students we are going to need to change our very system. It’s time to get rid of the “F” and the meaningless percentages. One way we can do this by moving to standards based grading. Standards based grading is based on the principle that students are assessed on the various standards they need to learn to move on to the next course. Students use a variety of ways to prove that they are proficient at each standard. A key piece of this is that students can keep trying and more towards proficiency without being punished for not knowing something yet.  The article “Seven Reasons for Standards-Based Grading” provides strong support for this type of system, including showing how standards based grading provides grades that actually have meaning and how it gives everyone involved (teachers, parents, and the students themselves) much more information about what the student knows and can do.

I personally would have learned more under a system like this that would have allowed me to fear failure less and learn more in the process. A 94% on a test covering a variety of topics only showed me that I knew how to take a test. It didn’t really show what pieces of chemistry I understood and which ones I still needed to work on. We need to shift to give our students this type of feedback. The failure and feedback that will help them grow and take risks and learn more than they ever thought possible.