It is to be anticipated that many will find it funny to assume that there is any importance of failure in education as ninety percent of them will ever doubt the credibility of that assumption. Already, the only big headline that is much expected in the academic sector is success, and an excellent one at that. This means any other news apart from that is definitely an ugly one and should not be welcomed at all.
Well, such case, as suggested above, is actually the case of the short-sighted educators who choose not to see beyond just the merits of a side of a coin. Success is certainly a result of some intentional efforts which means it is mostly preconceived and can be easily predicted because of the knowledge of the things that make it happen.
Another one reason why success is boring is that it is what everyone expects. It is no element of surprise and therefore cannot be parameter for growth. it is in fact an encouragement to complacency. Unlike, failure which is a contradiction of that boring event. Surprisingly, the often negative enigma which the society so dread gives the pump that fuels different kinds of excitement and it makes the subject become a better person.
Importance of Failure in Education
On the contrary, we shall together wring out some of the many importance of failure in education. This definitely draw you to see the light that awaits you at the end of the tunnel if you consider failure in a rather different light:
-
Building Resiliency
Getting students to feel comfortable with failing and building resilience needs to be encouraged by adults early in a student’s life. Many successful individuals relate in their personal stories how they learned from their failures.
The earlier you teach students the importance of failure in education, the easier it is for them to grasp the need for failure to learn to grow. If this is attempted later in a student’s life, like in high school, the educational stakes are higher, and this can cause more anxiety and further prevent students from seeing failure as a normal process.
Teachers can emphasize this learning in the classroom by teaching students to focus on the process, work in groups to get to an answer, and even have problem sets without answers. Doing this will create hesitations, frustrations, and conflict, with students defending each other’s work and solutions.
But this is where the learning happens and the soft skills of resiliency develop. This represents real life, where as adults, we may be handed a problem and work together to find the best solution without having an answer key to know if it is the right solution.
-
Developing Trust
Many students deal with major struggles in their everyday lives, and ignoring the problems is not a possibility. Students need to understand that struggling and failing are natural. Therefore, the most important part of defeat in life is the determination to get back up, try again, and move forward.
Read Also: 3 Reasons Failure is the Key to Success
When students are permitted to fail, they can nurture a better sense of who they can go to for help, what kind of help they need, and advocate for themselves as they learn who to trust.
When students constantly succeed, they avoid asking for help and tend not to feel as comfortable reciprocating it. Therefore, they do not develop those skills of knowing who they can trust when they need help during difficult life situations.
-
Engendering Academic Growth
For educators to be comfortable with failure, a school needs to establish a culture with a learning approach to failure. Examining academic growth — rather than achievements — is how school administrators can take steps to work with their current system.
Failure is not a bad thing, but rather guaranteed and inevitable when learning. Embracing and learning from it teaches trust, resilience, and lifelong learning. You can serve as a guide in the process of learning through lessons that encourage discussions and problems without answers to them. This can help students learn how to find meaning, problem solve, trust, and be resilient.
