Be it a bombed reading quiz or a botched science experiment, at some point every student fails in school. But students with a greater fear of failure are more likely to interpret normal academic challenges as severe and have less capacity to cope with academic stress.
In the last few years, educators Jennifer Boogaart in Arkansas, Alicia Wiechert in Illinois, and Doreen Kelleher in Massachusetts have all noticed a noticed a significant rise in perfectionism among their elementary students—a “kind of a mini-pandemic,” said Boogaart, a K-5 gifted enrichment teacher at John Tyson Elementary School of Innovation in Springdale, Ark. A rising social media focus on “curating” children’s activities to focus only on success and accomplishments exacerbates the problem, they say.
“As parents, teachers, coaches, I think we all try to protect kids from failing—we try to get them exact directions to follow and so on—but by doing this, we’re preventing kids from failing and learning from their mistakes,” said Wiechert, a K-4 library and information specialist at Romona Elementary School in Wilmette, Ill.
That’s why the three educators are now deliberately introducing students to failure as part of a larger goal of showing them how to reduce stress and gain academic resilience.
Boogaart, Wiechert, and Kelleher, a 4th grade teacher at Proctor Elementary School in Topsfield, Mass. are among 50 teachers nationwide piloting “Let Me Fail,” a program developed by entrepreneurship educators Lowey Bundy Sichol, author of the children’s series, From an Idea to ..., and Chic Thompson, executive director of What a Great Idea (WAGI) Labs, a nonprofit social incubator group for kids’ ideas. Students in the program read and discuss setbacks in the lives of successful inventors and businesses. The teachers also held “Failure Fridays” and longer events in which students tackled difficult, iterative projects and discussed how they learned from multiple attempts.
“Teachers are setting the classroom culture around failure, and it’s important that they are de-stigmatizing the word—positioning an action as a failure, not the student as a failure,” said Kathyrn Bateman, an assistant education professor at Penn State Harrisburg.
Bateman is not part of the Let Me Fail project, but works with teachers in the Northeast to develop K-8 engineering lessons in which students “flip failure” by analyzing testing data, finding creative solutions to problems, and improving designs.
When Boogaart asked her students to make paper airplanes from scratch, without directions, and let themselves fail, she got a “class full of blank stares.”
“They were like, ‘You want us to not do good?’” recalled Boogaart. “And I said yes. ... I just talked to them about how mistakes aren’t failures. They make you more creative and smarter and unstoppable.”
Boogaart’s classes went through multiple rounds of attempting to build their airplanes and reflecting on what went wrong. In the first few rounds of reflection, she said, students tended to focus on their feelings of frustration, anger, or insecurity. But after a few more attempts, students’ reflections turned more to diagnosing their mistakes and brainstorming ways to improve.
This iterative learning can both build student resilience and memory, according to Thompson, a former designer for Disney.
“When I failed and then learned how to do something that worked, I remembered it,” he said. “Failure anchors learning for me, where just reading about it and raising my hand never did.”
Wiechert introduced one 4th grade class to thinking about failure in a social studies lesson using “opposite brainstorming.” Students created the “worst possible treehouse,” then talked through why different pieces would be problematic and how to improve the design. “It got them to think about ideas they wouldn’t have thought about,” she said.
The project proved so popular last year that the school has planned a full day of designed-to-fail activities this year as part of the science curriculum for all 4th graders.
It’s important, however, not to “cheerlead” or romanticize failure, said Matthew Johnson, an associate teaching professor at the Penn State College of Education, who studies teacher feedback.
When students struggle or make mistakes on an assignment or project, Johnson found teachers often focus on managing students’ frustration or giving the correct answer rather than asking them to rethink their work.
“Teachers have to worry about getting through this huge amount of stuff, and so a lot of times their response is like, ‘OK, move on. We’ve got to go,’” Johnson said. But, “if failure is the end point, it’s not a good thing. Helping kids to identify what didn’t work, why it didn’t work, and then giving them space to think through how to make it better is super important.”
Boogaart agreed that time—or lack thereof—is a factor in why perfectionism seems to have expanded. “We just don’t have time to go back and fix mistakes,” she noted. She has started saving more time after every assignment for students to think through their mistakes and ways to avoid them in the future.
Kelleher, the Massachusetts 4th grade teacher, now keeps a “failure wall” in which students can post mistakes and what they learned from them.
“I saw so much growth in the kiddos, especially the ones that before, couldn’t put a pen to paper because they were so fearful ... that’s not good enough,” Kelleher said. “I just wanted to break through that mindset and say, ‘see, it’s OK. Actually, this mistake is going to teach us something.’”
Since starting to actively discuss and practice failure in her classes, Boogaart said she has seen a huge difference in students’ willingness to get started on a challenging assignment because now, “They know it’s fine,” she said. “‘I’m going to fail, but I’m going to come out on the other side of this.’”
