how can you help your students to accept failure (or losing) and continue on? course hero

Is it normal to accept failure as a lesson?

It’s NORMAL. Accepting failure as a lesson is one of the most important things I have ever learned. But what do we do when the rug is being pulled out from underneath us?

How can teachers help students accept failures?

Students’ failures tend to linger, creating mental baggage that interferes with learning. Lifting the burden requires us to address failure head-on and encourage students to accept it as a natural part of getting educated. Here’s how teachers can help students see the benefits and advantages of making mistakes:

Does failure help students learn more than success?

When confronted with failure, it’s easy for them to feel ashamed or believe success is too far out of reach. But if we can help students redefine what a mistake is, we can teach them a valuable lesson about improvement and learning. In this article, we’ll discuss the research behind how failure helps students more in the long-term than success.

How do you deal with failure?

People won’t pay notice to your failures, and if they do, you can rest assured that they’ll soon be forgotten. Treat each failure as an opportunity to refine your experiments, and keep pushing forward. If you do, you’ll find that the pain of defeat will fade fast and give way to new opportunities.

Assess yourself

Being bitter and shifting the blame elsewhere won’t change anything. Thinking that you’re infallible is not only unhealthy, it’s counterproductive. Be introspective: meditate on any possible mistakes you made that hindered your success. I look back and realize that I made four major mistakes in my philosophy course:

Feel good about your effort

Putting a lot of effort into something doesn’t alone guarantee a high grade. In my case, my initial outrage stemmed from putting in so much time and effort into studying for the exam. I soon realized that the amount of effort invested doesn’t mean anything if the final results are unsatisfactory to whoever is grading your work.

Learn to study smarter

Reconsider your study habits. If you already work hard, focus on readjusting the ways you study rather than the amount of time you spend studying. It wasn’t that I didn’t study for my exam; I laboriously did so in the two weeks leading up to it. My mistake was that I crammed in the material within that short period of time.

Look forward

After you re-evaluate your strengths and weaknesses, don’t waste any more time dwelling on your failure. Move on by focusing your energy on new work at hand. Not only will this take your mind off of it, it’s also an opportunity to demonstrate that you have learned from your mistakes.

Be at peace with liability

Get comfortable with the fact that the possibility of failure will always be there. Be at peace with it, because once you are, you’ll be better prepared for when it strikes again.

Why is failure important?

As it turns out, mistakes are integral to the learning process. Failure not only improves information recall but critical thinking, too. Students, however, don’t always understand the full learning potential of their mistakes. [5] . When confronted with failure, it’s easy for them to feel ashamed or believe success is too far out of reach.

How to help struggling students?

If you’re looking for ways to help your struggling students, one of the best things you can do is show them how to get the most out of their mistakes. Teach your students that the purpose of school isn’t to have all the answers already . It’s to learn new things and grow as individuals throughout the year.

Why do students who guessed first get feedback?

The researchers theorized that this is because the students who guessed first were better able to reflect on their incorrect guesses and study the correct answers for the test.

What is the key to learning from mistakes?

What’s the key to learning from mistakes? Reflection. Making (and correcting) mistakes provides us with self-awareness on what we did right and what we need to improve on. [1] When we get an answer correct, we may feel good for a moment, but we rarely reflect on our actions. Answering incorrectly, however, forces us to both analyze what happened and search for the correct answer. All that extra time spent reviewing and researching leads to stronger recall of what you studied, and it strengthens skills in finding and analyzing information. In other words: it leads to growth.

Why do students look to trusted adults in their lives?

Students often look to the trusted adults in their lives as a model for their own behavior. In class, studies suggest they often respond to their mistakes based on how their teachers act about them. [9] . For that reason, it is useful to apply these thoughts about mistakes to yourself as an educator, too. [2] .

What exactly is failure?

According to the Oxford Dictionary, there are many alternate definitions to failure, but the first definition provided shows the broad nature of failure:

Why is accepting failure important for good education and life outcomes?

The importance—and influence—of failure is perhaps best documented in Dr. Carol Dweck's work on mindsets. According to her research, those with a fixed-mindsets (people who see a particular trait as fixed—something you're born with or without) tend to avoid failure.

Can students be taught to accept failure?

As with teaching growth mindsets, the answer here is a very definitive – yes. Dweck's work demonstrates a number of approaches to helping students install the habit of applying a growth mindset to day-to-day challenges. The first of which seems to be as simple as simply educating them about the fact that fixed and growth mindsets exist!

Accepting failure and Passion Arena

In understanding the importance of accepting failure to any form of success, Passion Arena's programme is structured to support student understanding and acceptance of failure as an opportunity for increased learning.

Books on accepting failure

If you'd like to dive further into understanding self-control, we recommend the following books. Click on the titles for more information.

Videos on accepting failure

The acceptance of failure is referenced in a wide variety of talks, across many different subjects. Often in relation to striving for some form of success. It is often coupled with talks that also reference persistence, challenge or growth mindsets. Below, is a small sample of talks that have a focus on the role—and benefit—of failure.

Why is it important to embrace mistakes in education?

While educators have to ensure that students have the right content and support to avoid chronic failure, it is just as important to embrace mistakes as an inevitable part of education. Adopting a “fail faster” attitude makes students more likely to do the difficult work we ask of them.

Why are student benchmarks so complicated?

Student benchmarks have become more complicated, forcing students to transcend content knowledge and develop critical-thinking skills. This means more guessing, which can be intimidating for students.

What is true failure?

True failure, in the Platonic sense of the word, isn’t something that happens to us. Instead, it’s something we choose for ourselves, occurring when we allow the pain of our experimental failures to change our hearts and our minds for the worse.

What to do when bad things happen?

When bad things happen, all you can do is accept them, regroup, and plot a path forward. Don’t wallow in self-pity, or allow the pain you experience to cripple you going forward. Just keep moving. Like in the “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” the world will keep spinning.

How to stop feeling bad about failure?

1. Recognise and accept your emotions. Failure hurts, at least in the first instance, and you need to accept that. Trying to minimise your feelings or distract yourself can be counter-productive in the longer term. Just recognise your feelings for what they are and allow yourself time to hurt a bit.

Why is failure so devastating?

One reason why some people find failure devastating is that their identity is tied up in succeeding. In other words, when they fail, they see themselves as a failure, rather than perceiving that they have experienced a setback. Try not to see failure or success as personal: instead, it is something that you experience.

What happens if you fail to win a sports competition?

Failing to win a sports competition, especially a major event that you have been working towards for several years, or to get a promotion or pay-rise, can feel devastating at the time. When you look back later over the whole of your life, however, it is unlikely to feature as one of your defining events—especially if you have later gone on to succeed in the same field. When humanity looks back over the last 500 years, your ‘failure’ certainly won’t feature.

Can you control what other people think?

You cannot ever control what other people think. Nor should you ever do something simply because it will please other people. It is easier to accept both success and failure if you define them in your own terms, and do things because you want to achieve, not because you think other people will be pleased.

Written By

Jason Saltzman is a seasoned entrepreneur with a background in sales and marketing. Through his role as CEO of Alley and as a TechStars mentor, he advises hundreds of startups, offering real-life practical application and creative marketing advice.

Jason Saltzman

Jason Saltzman is a seasoned entrepreneur with a background in sales and marketing. Through his role as CEO of Alley and as a TechStars mentor, he advises hundreds of startups, offering real-life practical application and creative marketing advice.