Normalising mistake-making in my classroom

This post was originally part of my longer writing on the 5Ws and gradual release usage. It didn't quite fit overall there, but I felt it was still worth having.

Normalising failure

I told myself at the start of my teaching career that there is one thing I want to prioritise in my classroom: the prevalence of failure.

I don't imagine this to be a new idea. Classrooms are intrinsically designed to be locations of growth and improvement. Yet, education anxiety, school refusal (or school can't, a program focused on the "challenges and distress of caring for a child or young person experiencing school attendance difficulties"), and test anxiety continue to be prevalent in today's era of modern teaching and classroom design. As a fellow anxiety-sufferer myself, when I see the anxious students in my class (and there are many anxious students), that human need to relate constantly crops up.

I introduced myself to all my classrooms by telling them that I'm expecting us to fail.

And if you heard the pin drop, that's because all my students were immediately confused. Probably because none of them has ever seen Star Wars Rebels.

[About "Do or do not: there is no try."] If all I do is try, that means I don’t truly believe I can succeed. So from now on, I will teach you. Look, I may fail. You may fail. But there is no try. (Star Wars Rebels--S1Ep5, Rise of the Old Masters)

The point of green failure is that failure is a good thing. What is the colour green, if not a signifier of good, go, positive? If we fail, we improve. It means there is room for growth, for expansion of our understanding, and for our chance to rise to the occasion when challenged. What is the point of a classroom, if not to fail? And so, the expectations I ensure students follow through on are:

• We participate in each task and activity, and prepare to get things wrong.
• We do not belittle other students for questions or answers some might think are silly.
• We acknowledge mistakes and move on.

Green Failure as a classroom philosophy is focused more on high-achievers, who fear falling off the pedestal they or their peers and parents may have placed them on. It's the same kind of thing that the Just Write motif I gave in an earlier post does, though I generally feel Just Write focuses more on students who get stuck and think they cannot write or do the task because they didn't know what to write or were "too dumb" to do the task (a phrase I think many of us have had from a student at some point in our career--I've had three of those so far, and I've officially been a teacher for a month).

This doesn't make an idyllic classroom, of course, but it's the opening foundation for an environment where these students can feel open to express ideas to me that they may not think are correct.