Never walk away from failure. On the contrary, study it carefully and imaginatively for its hidden assets.
Michael Korda
Professor Vinit Desai (University of Colorado Denver Business School), says that while success may be sweeter, failure is a far better teacher.
Prof Desai compared the flights of the space shuttles Atlantis and Challenger:
During the 2002 Atlantis flight, a piece of insulation broke off and damaged the left solid rocket booster but did not impede the mission or the programme. There was little follow-up or investigation.
The Challenger was launched next and another piece of insulation broke off. This time the shuttle and its seven-person crew were destroyed. The disaster prompted the suspension of shuttle flights and led to a major investigation resulting in 29 recommended changes to prevent future calamities.
The difference in response in the two cases, Prof Desai said, came down to this: The Atlantis was considered a success and the Challenger a failure.
“Whenever you have a failure, it causes a company to search for solutions and when you search for solutions it puts you as an executive in a different mindset, a more open mindset,” said Prof Desai.
He said the airline industry is one sector of the economy that has learned from failures, at least when it comes to safety.
“Despite crowded skies, airlines are incredibly reliable,” he said. “The number of failures is minuscule.”
“And past research has shown that older airlines, those with more experience in failure, have a lower number of accidents.”
(Prof Desai does not recommend seeking out failure in order to learn.)
Source: https://news.ucdenver.edu/failurebestteacher/
The perspective that “failure” is a critical part of success is one that is central to Process Education and SII-Assessment. From letting students fail so they can succeed, to the embedded notion of constant improvement as part and parcel of life-long learning, failure is not seen as an end, but a tremendous opportunity for teaching and learning.
But have we made the leap from accepting that failure does happen and trying to improve upon it (letting students fail) to actually providing explicit opportunities for students to fail and then helping them learn how to maximize the learning that these opportunities represent?
Professor Desai may not recommend seeking out failure in order to learn, but his study appeared in the Academy of Management Journal and is geared toward organizational or business models. Perhaps a classroom is the one place that seeking out or engineering failure in order to teach about it and learn from it could be a virtue instead of a costly mistake. But is doing so desirable?
Consider: What if a grade for a carefully-engineered and explained failure (where students are aware of what is going on) were to be based on the amount learned from the failure, in a post-failure analysis and write-up, as opposed to the failure itself? Wouldn’t that be an exciting learning opportunity?
While this is not a wholly new approach, rarely is it presented as actual learning from failure. Most of us try so very hard to never couch poor performances as anything other than improvable. Perish the thought that we ever use the word ‘fail’ in the classroom. Is it possible that in leaning so far toward success and improvement that we’ve left behind the opportunity for maximizing what we can teach and our students can learn from an actual failure?
Why NOT engineer an opportunity for failure to see how much we can teach and learn?
