Thanks Roxanne! I think it would be hard for us to generalize that finding at this stage, but I'd say that generally speaking classroom educators have been a bit more reluctant given the relation to grades and such. That said, informal educators are often bound by the need to make experience "fun" and failure seems antithetical to that. Do you have a sense or a hypothesis? 

Thanks for your comment, Jim! Two thoughts come to mind.

One aspect we noticed was how training in other disciplines influenced educator's perspectives. Some had an engineering background, so the idea of iteration/process and a design cycle helped them to re-frame failure for learners. The three educators in the video are also artists, and so they always emphasized personalization and creativity with learners as a way to downplay failure as an end-state.

In addition to the influence of the disciplines, we also noticed that failure could re-framed when affordances or limitations of the materials were explored. For example, in one carpentry summer camp, bent nails was a frustrating but totally normal part of the learning process. One instructor made a "Museum of Bent Nails" bucket for kids to put theirs in when it happened. There were many more nails to use - so even though that nail was a failure, it was easy (and even funny?) to keep going onto the next one. 

Thanks, Noah! That's a great question. Our research questions at the beginning of the project were around how youth and educators identified and defined moments of failure during making, and how their definitions aligned (or didn't!). In the interviews, questions about failure ultimately led to conversations about why the learner or educator perceived an event as an failure (what was failing, and and against what standard?). Several of the educators we talked with realized that if they really wanted their learners to reflect on a failure or a struggle ("What just happened there? Why didn't that work out like you expected it to?") they needed to reduce the number of things they wanted to accomplish in a class. That is, they needed to simplify and to slow down so there was time for reflection on those moments that didn't go as they expected. 

In addition - and this isn't a small thing - several educators told us they appreciated our conversations around the topic of failure because it had never really been OK to talk about. Through focusing on failure, they discovered their own opinions they didn't know they had. Jan, who you see in the video said to us: "Sometimes you don't know your own philosophy because you don't get listened to for long." It was very important for them to have a supportive space to explore their own thoughts about how failure fit into their teaching philosophy.

Irina - to add to Alice's response - we have been thinking a lot about how educators play a role in these experiences. In case it's useful, I share our paper (link below) where we took survey responses from many maker educators about their views and how they try to encourage persistence in these experiences. I believe it addresses some of your questions. 

Failing to Learn

Rabiah - great to hear from you! 

We are quite certain that the treatment of failure at home (and in a youth's past) is quite influential in how they approach failure. We dug into this a bit through the interviews we did with youth when we asked them about their views on and experiences with failure. These were early in the project but I don't remember there being too much mention of parents in the responses but I'd bet that they absolutely have an influence. 

One piece of evidence we did have that relates to this is that we had many educators tell us that when there is any type of public performance or demonstration of what the students made, often in the form of a show and tell to parents or caregivers, then this strongly increases the chances that youths would have more extreme emotional reactions to failure in the final stages than if this type of public performance was not part of the expectations. I'd hypothesize that the responses are related to a combination of a student's internal conceptions about failure and what they expect from their caregivers too. 

Do you have any thoughts or hypotheses? 

Hi Adam! So happy to see you on here. Thanks for the reply and additional info! In some current work where our team has end-of-program "finale" events where parents and caregivers are present, we haven't looked at emotional reactions to failure vs. during regular programming days. Your note has me thinking that we should.

I've been out of the maker learning space for a brief bit and don't have any current insights, unfortunately. But it always struck me (still does) that failure in STEM-rich spaces can have strong cultural influences, e.g. if STEM is seen as a critical/sole pathway to career and economic stability, families may resist failure as acceptable in any form. Katie mentions this as well below.  I know there is scholarship on this kind of family dynamic in minoritized and immigrant populations around classroom learning and athletics, but I'm not yet familiar with work showing the connections to OST learning environments. Adding this to my reading list!

Anne - that's a great way to think about the differences. My sense is that the best way to achieve this is to create a culture where iteration toward improvement is a core ideal. This will help to instill the idea that whether failure or not, the idea is that all of our work can improve and that it's important for us to keep working to attain the best possible result. Two ways I tried to do this in my classes is a) making sure students are allowed time for multiple revisions and b) talking explicitly about having them complete versions of an assignment with clear articulation of what they changed from one version to the next. Do you think those options might work? 

Hi Adam (and everyone), to me, I'm hearing and reading a lot about what the word "failure" means, and it brings to mind criticisms I've heard where for a lot of communities, failure is not an option (or basically, for a lot of privileged populations, failure is a privilege) - aside from engineering as Anne notes. I'm wondering if within the researchers, there might be Failure and failure (like Identity and identity) - attempting and not getting enough points on an end-of-course exam might be Failure (especially if it happens at a time to prevent high school graduation or grade progression, whatever). But little-f failure is more what we're talking about in the culture of iteration. Not sure that would resonate with students, though :)

So yes, I suspect there's a benefit to calling things "drafts" or "versions" instead of failures (which seems more final). I try to tell my research students that what they typically do at the end of a class is usually the first draft of something in the life of a research paper that will be published. I mean even the word "prototype" implies progress. Maybe it's also a matter of redefining the idea of an endpoint or goal as simply a first step, or endpoint-for-now-until-we-know-better. So the expectation as "the best solution given what you know at this point", which I think can still be high. This fits with your model - you could even give them assignments that model this moving endpoint: assignment 1, make X with Y; assignment 2, now make X with Y and Z; assignment 3, remove Y, etc. So it's both about a moving endpoint and a growth in the student - they can both change (and often do). 

Are you seeing a lot of reluctance to do the first version/draft, and when you return with comments/suggestions, less reluctance to revise and go from there? I feel like that's what we've set up students to do with the single-end-game test/paper model.

I like this thinking, "failure" is such a negative word! No one wants to fail, to be at the bottom. Perhaps we can change the rhetoric here, instead of "fail" what about "improve"? Let's strive to improve, even if something is perfect, perhaps it would be interesting to make it better! Like double stuff Oreos! :)

Thank you for your comment Anne. I love your comparison to double stuff Oreos. We are beginning to consider ways to normalize failure as part of the making context. Be sure to continue following our work.

Hi Regina - That's a great question. Before I offer too many thoughts I think it's important to contextualize our study in the field of making and tinkering education, which already sits on the boundaries of formal and informal learning. Many of the educators and programs we know are less interested in test performance than they are about youth development and 21st Century Skills (e.g. collaboration, confidence, creativity, problem solving, etc.) 

That said, I think once we've gotten past what adults think about failure as it relates to learning we tend to see that conversations do come around to values of of 'getting through hard things' which seems relatable for educators, parents and learners. Whether or not people want to use the concept of failure seems less important than the idea that educators do want learners to experience challenge, struggle and risk-taking. 

There's a good book called The Gift of Failure written by Jessica Lahey (an educator and parent) that deals with your question more directly. 

Hi Meriem. This is a great question and one we should open up to the larger community. How do you help children work through their frustrations to have a productive response to failure? In what ways can we as educators normalize failure within making contexts?

First of all, this is a great video and such an important topic! Well done!

I use the word FAIL as an acronym: First Attempt In Learning; I actually tell my students that I expect them to fail. To support them in working through their frustrations, I have done read-alouds (Rosie Revere, Engineer comes to mind) and pointed out how the characters have dealt with failure. Together we come up with suggested actions they can take when they are feeling frustrated, such a deep breathing, journaling, walking away from a project for a bit, or even looking for ways to help classmates with an entirely different project, which often sends them back to their own work with a fresh perspective. When their projects fail, we look for ways in which they met parts of the criteria and/or constraints and commend them for those things. We give multiple opportunities to go through the design process, noting that it's an iterative, circular process, not a straight line from start to finish.

As an educator, it's so important to embrace failure as part of the process and to encourage our students by focusing on the positive, asking questions to help them discover for themselves what their next steps should be. It is also very important to be honest about our own failures and let students see that we don't do everything right the first time, either.

Rebecca,

Thanks for sharing and for your comment. just the other day I was talking with a few maker educators from museums who were tell me how they help kids work through similar situations. Like your response, nearly all of their focus is on getting them to work through it rather than just "fixing" the problem for them. In talking to them and reading yours it makes me happy as these results add more conformation to the work we published in Thinking Skills & Creativity. Now we just need to work with a wider range of educators to support them in being comfortable with this too!  

Torran - personally (and somewhat humorously) my daughter reminds me that I am researching failure and that when something doesn't work for me I need to tell myself to keep working through it! In this project, specifically, I think we have had a few approaches to data collection that didn't work. One was where we were going to collect video from students one day, watch the video overnight and try to ask them about moments of failure two days later. Idea seemed great, but we just couldn't process the data that quickly. So, there have been a few instances like that, but we just keep plugging away and think of alternative approaches to get what we want. So, I think we've generally been modelling good practices in persistence!  :)

To continue this discussion, I decided to wear a GoPro camera to capture my interactions with upper elementary students engaging in making activities. It is alarming what you learn in watching yourself on video as I was not necessarily modeling appropriate behavior for the undergraduate students I was working with in the space. I found myself not allowing the elementary students to experience failure as much as I thought (or hoped for). However, being on this project has made me aware of such instances and trying to be mindful of my response (or not) to failures not only in making contexts but other contexts such as an academic setting.

Ellis - great question! I am not sure if anything comes from the arts or engineering, but I know there is not much from the sciences. We definitely encountered this issue when we were researching undergraduate research experiences and at that time there was little to no work out there about this.