What if the Biggest Takeaway is Redefining Failure?

‍I had one of those eye-opening, full-awakening, sudden realization moments recently and feel compelled to share it:

I was on a call with my friend Kevin Van Harn from Grand Rapids Christian Schools and we were talking through his experiences from having spent the last two years building an entrepreneurship program at his school.

Kevin is the textbook example of what every school should look for when selecting an entrepreneurship program director–his passion was obvious several years back when he attended our entrepreneurship symposium and having worked with him the last two years, I can say that he embodies the magic formula required: a strong desire to foster student engagement.

So when he gave his students a reflection assignment and shared the results with me, I was all ears.

‍“The most obvious shift for students with the entrepreneurial mindset,” Kevin said, “is redefining failure.”

He went on to explain that for the students, they’ve been told, since the start of their education, that failing in school is a bad thing. You don’t want a bad grade, and you don’t want to have to re-do an assignment, so you avoid failure. Now that they are actively engaged in developing an entrepreneurial mindset, however, they are seeing a different side of failure.

In Kevin’s words, “[they] never thought about the fact that failing is how you learn and grow.”

‍Failing is how you learn and grow.

Wow–now that’s the essence of transformative education. That’s the essence of the Japanese word “kaizen” (continuous improvement) that Angela Duckworth so eloquently references in her research on “grit”--if we are going to continue to learn and grow and focus on our continuous improvement, we must understand the role of failure in the journey to success and see it as a necessary stepping stone and learning experience.

This means altering how we grade/measure assessments–perhaps altering the entire assessment itself. It means building prototyping and feedback for improvement into our everyday practices. It means creating regular time for reflections for students to identify what they would do differently and then giving them the opportunity to make those changes. It means using growth mindset language like “not yet,” and normalizing mistakes.

Let’s help our students move from fearing failure to embracing its necessity–and let’s go one step further to define failure as “not trying in the first place.”

Ready to explore what this can look like at your school? Let’s connect…

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