Teaching Students How to Fail

For years, as problems or failures arose, I have shared with the secondary school students, parents, and staff the four steps they need to turn a mistake or a failure into a positive learning opportunity.  Recently, I changed principal assignments from a middle school to an elementary school. I decided to teach all students how to fail.

First, they need to own their mistake or failure. They have to admit it. They have to be able to say "I failed" not "the teacher failed me." They have to learn to say "I cheated" or "I said something mean." This is hard to learn, but it is the first step in being able to learn from mistakes. And parents, if we want to raise resilient children, it is necessary to let them own their failures, not protected from them.  When we rescue a child from a mistake or failure, we reinforce for them that mistakes and failure are really bad, like the other things we protect them from, e.g., sunburn, poison, drugs, and violence.

Second, after owning their mistakes, children need to fix whatever the outcomes were to the mistakes.  Some people might consider this step the "natural consequent." IF you call someone a name, you need to say you are sorry.  IF you fail a math test, you need to learn and do the corrections. "Fixing it" teaches students to be responsible for their actions. Fixing it is necessary so that students can learn from their mistakes, which is the third step.  

Learning from mistakes turns mistakes into opportunities for growth. This helps us to not repeat them. Learning from mistakes requires students to be reflective which makes for deep learning.

Finally, once we have owned, fixed, and learned from our mistakes, we need to teach our children to move on.  Put those mistakes and failures behind us.  When we perseverate on our mistakes and failures, we get stuck. That is not fair to do to ourselves. Likewise, if we keep bringing up our child's (or student's) mistakes, we are not honoring the fact that we are all human, and every day is a new day and a new chance to do better.

Our children love us and want us to be happy with them. That makes it even harder for them to admit or tell their mistakes to us. Let's teach them that failures can be opportunities IF we move through them by owning them, fixing them, learning from them, and moving on. And let's also model those four steps when we make mistakes.  That way our children will not only become comfortable with taking risks in their learning, they also will become confident that they can grow as learners and human beings, too.