Encouraging Risk-Taking by Assessing 'Quality of Failure'

Have you heard yet of Stanford professor Carol Dweck's theory of mindsets? Dweck has identified two basic attitudes people can hold with regard to their own intelligence. According to her website,

In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. They also believe that talent alone creates success—without effort. They’re wrong.

On the other hand, 

In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment. Virtually all great people have had these qualities.

Dweck's 2006 book Mindset has become one of the seminal texts for teacher professional development. She, Alfie Kohn, and Tony Wagner are a few leading voices in the growing chorus who suggest that our traditional methods of assessment may actually impede the learning we want to inspire. In a 21st Century economy that prizes innovation more than ever, our schools may actually be breeding fixed mindsets.  

The truth is, constructing our own understanding requires making mistakes. 

"Mistakes are not just opportunities for learning," writes philosopher Daniel Dennett; "they are, in an important sense, the only opportunity for learning or making something truly new." Dennett suggests that mistakes drive learning in almost same way mutation drives evolution--a progressive trend that requires plenty of failures. He offers sage advice for how to capitalize on mistakes:

The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them — especially not from yourself. Instead of turning away in denial when you make a mistake, you should become a connoisseur of your own mistakes, turning them over in your mind as if they were works of art, which in a way they are. … The trick is to take advantage of the particular details of the mess you’ve made, so that your next attempt will be informed by it and not just another blind stab in the dark. . . 

So when you make a mistake, you should learn to take a deep breath, grit your teeth, and then examine your own recollections of the mistake as ruthlessly and as dispassionately as you can manage. It’s not easy. The natural human reaction to making a mistake is embarrassment and anger (we are never angrier than when we are angry at ourselves), and you have to work hard to overcome these emotional reactions. Try to acquire the weird practice of savoring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then, once you have sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having made them, you can cheerfully set them behind you, and go on to the next big opportunity. But that is not enough: you should actively seek out opportunities to make grand mistakes, just so you can then recover from them.

Here's the problem: traditional assessment penalizes mistakes. To earn an "A," you've got to be right 93% of the time; your failure rate can be no higher than 7%. Alternatively, Tony Wagner often cites an interview with Mark Chandler, senior vice president and general counsel at Cisco: 

I say to my employees, if you try five things and get all five of them right, you may be failing. If you try 10 things, and get eight of them right, you're a hero. You'll never be blamed for failing to reach a stretch goal, but you will be blamed for not trying.

It's clear our schools are not yet on board with this thinking. So what would it look like if we were?

As a Middlebury grad, it pains me to see good ideas coming out of Williams College. But that's where Edward Burger teaches Mathematics, in courses that include a "quality of failure" grade. 

Burger takes issue with the traditional content-delivery model that "[jumps] over the requisite missteps that originally led to the discovery at hand." If we're not careful, we obscure the record of failures that preceded major contributions to human knowledge, deify those who achieved them, and mystify the process of innovation. 

"In reality," Burger writes, much like Dennett, "every idea from every discipline is a human idea that comes from a natural, thoughtful, and (ideally) unending journey in which thinkers deeply understand the current state of knowledge, take a tiny step in a new direction, almost immediately hit a dead end, learn from that misstep, and, through iteration, inevitably move forward."

"But how do we foster such a critical habit of mind in our students?" he asks. "Answer: Just assess it." 

In Burger's courses, five percent of every student's grade assesses their quality of failure: the risks they attempted, and the falls they took, on their way toward constructing understanding. Burger introduces the risk-taking ideal from the beginning of the course, reinforces it throughout, and at the end, asks students to write a one-page essay reflecting on when they failed and how successfully they learned from it. The students assign themselves a grade from 1-10, and most often, Burger "award[s] them the surprisingly honest and restrained grades they gave themselves." 

I am completely taken with this idea, and look forward to trying it out in my own classes. 

What would it look like in an English class?

I think English students should be failing regularly in two course components: their writing, and their analysis.

The closest I get right now to assessing failure is by assessing how substantially a second draft has improved from the first. A first draft is never perfect, and perfection should never be the goal. By commenting on but not grading first drafts, I hope to encourage risk-taking in voice, argumentation, and analysis (and by refusing to comment on first drafts that don't meet basic expectations, I hope to discourage sloppiness; that's a battle, to be sure). By assessing on my rubric how substantially the new draft has developed, I hope to encourage students to carry their failures forward into lessons.

On a daily basis, as well, students should be risking half-baked, emerging analyses. Some won't be tenable. But discussion should be a collaborative exercise in pursuing analyses to the point where they sink or swim, and developing the swimmers into arguments. Students should pursue the same process individually as they plan their essays; I teach a "Scientific Method" of pre-writing, and perhaps there's a way of assessing the hypotheses that a student discarded on the way to her thesis. 

The two keys to Burger's approach seem to be reinforcing risk-taking over the course of the term, and the assigning a reflective self-assessment at the end. Ending my courses in the past, I've asked students to reflect on their intellectual risk-taking; but as I haven't always reinforced that aim, students often have struggled to recall what risks they took.

I'm excited to move forward in Burger's footsteps, and hopefully cultivate more growth mindsets in my classes. You can expect to see a "quality of failure" grade outlined on my next syllabus.

Over/under: How much planning is really necessary? Part I: Over

It was September 2008. I was fewer than four months out of college, and a night away from beginning the teaching career I'd aspired to for years. I would teach three sections the next day: two of sophomore (Form IV) Humanities, and one of Form V American Literature....And I was going to be prepared.

The sophomore summer reader at this school was just a little book (only a poem, really!): The Aeneid. The juniors had "read" Huckleberry Finn. You know, a couple lightweight texts, no worries about leaving students alone with dense Classical allusion or satire on America's racist past...

I planned every five minutes of those classes: I knew, following a trip through the detailed syllabus, all the questions I'd ask, and everywhere I'd lead the discussion. I bet I even planned my jokes.

And then, of course, the kids hadn't read. Or they hadn't read well. And I adapted, and we all adjusted, and after a few weeks we got to know each other and started to learn.

I taught at that school for two years, and continued to plan heavily--but I'd learned I had to be just as prepared to improvise.

Fast forward two years. New school, new material--this time of my own choosing. I had let go of planning every minute of my classes, but I still knew everything I wanted us to cover and the order I hoped we'd cover it in.

The kids were so enthusiastic. It was going great!

...for me.

After a few weeks I got feedback that the students felt I was stifling them.

And they were right. As always, I'd known where I wanted the conversation to go; and as it turns out, I'd taken all that enthusiasm, that excitement over the vibrant texts we were reading, and I'd tried to wrangle it, to wrestle and shape it toward my ends, regardless of what the students really were thinking and wanted to say. I had them excited, and I was wasting it, because my excitement was more important to me than theirs was.

Fast forward another couple years, to now. Most days, I plan one question, and I give it to students for a blog reflection ahead of class. When it turns out to be the right question--it doesn't always--we spend long enough on it in the first part of discussion to send us in plenty of productive directions for the rest of the period. I can't help but have some ideas of where I'd like things to go, but I'm trying hard to let go of the reins and allow the students to follow their own ideas. On days when it wasn't the right question, I diagnose: where did I lose them? I try to find something that we all did understand, and build from there. This is an act of improvisation. It's harried, it's exhausting; but it's genuine. In that same spirit, I don't bother planning my discussion questions (except the unit's essential questions) weeks ahead of time, because they have to come out of the progress we've made recently, which can't be predicted.

I expect I'll write a great deal more in this space about leading discussion. There's so much more for me to learn! But I've learned for sure it's a waste of time--and worse, a pedagogical sin--to plan too much, and to prioritize the plan over the students' understanding.