With the new school year starting for me in just over a week I have been thinking about what I want my mantra for the year to be. What is it that will not only raise the achievement of my students, but also that of my own work and the teachers in my faculty.  "Fail more often" is going to be my starting point for the year as I think it has the potential to be the path to greater success.  This mantra is similar to what was said during my leadership training with Education Changemakers,  quite often the program facilitators Aaron Tait and Dave Faulkner would say "Don't worry, be crappy".  This idea really resonated with me and fit well with some current reading I have been doing on the Growth Mindset by Dr Carol Dweck. 

The idea of failure, no matter how small, is debilitating to lots of people.  They would rather not try and avoid failure, rather than give it a go and having the possibility of not being successful.  Why is this... because generally as a society we are very intolerant of failure, it becomes a label on the person rather than a commentary on the situation.  Instead of "I failed to get this right", the internal dialogue becomes "I'm a failure", instead of "that program didn't really have the intended outcomes" it becomes "They are bad at their job".  This view has to change, students need to see that failure is a major component of success, it is not the opposite of success.  They need to see that failure is an important part of the learning process and that it is vital to fail if you are going to identify and rectify those areas of weakness. 

So why do I think this idea of failure is so important, well I have a few main reasons. You will have to forgive me with this post, I am a bit of a fan of a nice quote and this post is going to contain a few

1. Failing shows that you are challenging yourself to improve beyond your current understanding, not coasting. 
   
   For a moment I will yield the floor to Woody Allen who said.
   
   "If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative"
   
   This idea of challenging yourself becomes an important one.  You can stick to the questions you know how to do, get them all right and pump up your self esteem, but ultimately you have not learn a thing.  If you are getting all the easy questions right you obviously understand it, you are not learning anything new and therefore you have wasted an opportunity to improve.  On the other hand, challenging yourself often results in failure, at least in the short term.  You are attempting something outside your current level of understanding and therefore have to work much harder to make sense of it.  Even if you don't get it right that lesson, you have probably learnt a range of ways in which the problem can't work.  Research has shown simply thinking about really hard questions can improve your overall level of intelligence (don't ask for the reference for this as I have tried to find it and can't find the article I was reading).
   
   
2. Failing means you are trying
   
   This is related to the previous point, but also needs to be emphasised.  Effort and perseverance are quite often the most important ways to overcome any problem, try hard and keep trying until you have solved it.  If failure knocks you down get up and try again, don't get knocked down by failure and then stay down.  Again I will let someone else say it who has better words than me
   
   "There's only one thing that can guarantee our failure, and that's if we quit"
   Craig Breedlove
   
   "Our greatest weakness lies in giving up.  The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time"
   Thomas Edison
   
   
3. Failure helps you to identify and rectify your areas of weakness.
   
   The key to success and improvement is to work on those things you find very difficult, not the things you find easy.  Ultimately it is those weaknesses which will be your downfall in any difficult situation.  Knowing where and how you can improve becomes a step to closing the gaps you have.
   
   

All though to this point the post has focussed mainly on students, as stated earlier it is also completely valid in examining my own teaching practice and will be what I am emphasising to teachers in the Maths faculty.  Key to improving as a teacher is trying new things, not getting stagnate in your teaching.  However in trying new and innovative things your are likely to have a few bad lessons, it might be because it is new to you and the implementation didn't go so well, or it might be because it is completely different to the students and they just were taken a bit off guard, but in any case, whether it is a success or a failure, the most important part is reflecting upon what the students got from it and why it was a success or a failure.  The three points made above fit nicely into this.

I am curious to see how this goes and how students and staff respond to my quest to fail more often, but I will comment on this as the year progresses.

I have been thinking about my previous post on the importance of developing a growth mindset towards all aspects of your education and how this can be done.  The word 'yet' has the potential to dramatically improve your outlook on your education and encourage you to try harder, but why?

Saying 'I am not good at Maths' gives the impression that it is a feature that defines you, it says that you are just a person that will never have the ability to do well in the subject, it just isn't in your DNA.  However by saying 'I am not good at Maths yet' it completely changes this outlook.  It does acknowledge some difficulty in understanding, but it also acknowledges that it is something that can be improved on, it is something that is possible to attain. 'I can't do it' says that no matter how hard I try, it just won't happen, so extra effort is pointless.  'I can't do it yet' means that with extra effort there can be improvement and if I continue to work and continue to improve then I can eventually overcome those difficulties.

This is a message I need to instill in my students and in my feedback them.  Whenever they say 'I can't do it' I need to make sure I get them to also say 'yet'.  I don't want them to take this easy option as it limits their improvement and their outcomes.