Ernest L. Boyer and the Scholarship of Integration

July 20, 2010, 08:00 AM ET

Using Failure to Reflect on our Teaching

[This is a guest post by Janine Utell, who is an Associate Professor of English at Widener University in Pennsylvania. She teaches composition and 19th and 20th century British literature; she has also facilitated a number of on- and off-campus workshops on writing, critical thinking, and general education. You can follow Janine on Twitter: @janineutell.]

For a lot of ProfHacker readers, the semester has been over for a couple of months now, and as we get closer to preparation for a new academic year, we might be more ready to look at our teaching with fresh eyes. For some of us, maybe reaching this point took awhile: time, space, decompressing, some journaling, confiding in friends, a lot of hand-wringing, teeth-gnashing, garment-rending, self-loathing...

Or maybe it's just me.

In the past, I've found a lot of generous and useful writing on ProfHacker addressing these impulses towards self-doubt and the freakouts that can ensue when it comes to teaching. A lot of us might agree that a stance of mindfulness is important to good teaching: a conscientiousness about taking the intellectual and emotional temperature of the room over the course of the semester, a willingness to adjust as we go depending on the needs of the students and the demands of the material, a general state of being present. (The education activist Parker Palmer has excellent work on this, in particular his book The Courage to Teach.)

When you feel like it's all gone horribly wrong, though, such a state of mindfulness can turn into a real downward spiral. This past semester, I'll admit (here, on the internet in front of everyone) that in a lot of ways I was a failure as a teacher. Nothing went right: classroom and time management, assignment and syllabus design, creating guidelines and boundaries. There were a lot of reasons for this: service commitments, projects that needed finishing, post-tenure finding my way. Perhaps readers will recognize some of these challenges; I offer them in the spirit of diagnosis, not excuse-making.

Being able to talk about failure is a crucial part of overcoming the dark place that acknowledging it can create. At the same time, it's scary for us as individual teachers, and as a profession overall. How can you reflect on your failure, let alone acknowledge it, when doing so means admitting you might not be an expert, and may put your very job in jeopardy—a state of affairs I acknowledge is quite real?

Finding a safe space in which to reflect upon and recover from failure is necessary to moving on. Not just to becoming better teachers—we know that reflecting on strengths and weaknesses is vital to improving our practice—but to regaining the confidence to go into a classroom and be present for our students.

To that end, and as a way both to think about my own failures and to create that space for others, I ran a workshop at the end of the semester for colleagues from a range of disciplines. We began with a quick written reflection, something anyone could do on their own:

What were all the ways you failed this semester?

Then parse out the particular kinds of failures these might have been. Were they related to:

Pacing the work of individual class meetings?
Spacing out the work of the syllabus (readings, assignments)?
Incompleteness?
Incoherence?
Outside demands on your time and attention (administrative duties, service commitments)?
Over/underpreparing?
Textbooks or other course materials?
Expectations, either yours or the students'?
Group dynamics?

If I can pinpoint a specific strategy that failed, I stop thinking of myself as a failure and can find something concrete to fix. I can use past problem-solving to remind myself of my strengths: I've fixed that before, I can fix it again. I can see, too, if perhaps a class going badly came from something that was out of my control. Every class has a life of its own. That means every class that fails, fails in a particular way. It also means that every class that succeeds does so at least in part because of a particular and providential confluence of our strengths and those of the students.

Since we are in the business of teaching and learning, we can use our past successes to figure out how to solve the problems of our current failures. So, next we reflect:

What was a failure you learned from that changed the way you teach?

Reflecting on such a question shows us how we've developed a repertoire of strategies—a toolbox—into which we might reach again and again to cope with new challenges. This question also speaks to an ever-evolving component of our teaching and how we craft our practice: individual style. Sometimes our style leads to our success. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes in a particularly tough semester we reach a crossroads: do we compromise, do we alter our style to save a class? Even more: do we alter our expectations, our priorities?

The assessment of craft and practice, even when you're not feeling like a failure, is a good thing. And restoring some confidence through this kind of reflection might give you the equipment for dealing with unexpected challenges next time—without feeling like a failure.

What have been some moments where you felt like a class was unsatisfactory, incomplete...a failure? How did you resolve it?

[Image by Flickr user hans.gerwitz / Creative Commons licensed]

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Comments

1. perneb32 - July 20, 2010 at 05:02 pm

A failure is only a failure if you don't learn from it. When things take an unexpected turn for me, I ask, "What is the lesson I'm to learn here?" It may take some time to get there, but eventually there's an 'aHA!'... I need 'patience', or "You let your ego get in the way again." It's not so much that I'm 'to blame', rather since I'm part of the interaction, I do carry some of the responsibility. The question is 'what is it and how much.'
Rich Pernell

2. paul_r - July 20, 2010 at 05:12 pm

It may be somewhat overused, but the saying goes "there is no such thing as failure only feedback"

3. delaneykirk - July 20, 2010 at 07:19 pm

I tried using technology (wikis, Twitter) in a management class and found the students very resistant and not understanding why they had to learn technology AND the course content. This was reflected in their evals of me. I'm thinking now that I needed to "sell" the benefits to the students first-perhaps by bringing in guest speakers to talk about how this is used in businesses.

4. delaneykirk - July 20, 2010 at 07:22 pm

Great discussion here especially in some of the comments: http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Share-Your-Ideas-for/25625/

5. osholes - July 21, 2010 at 07:29 am

When it comes time for tenure or promotion, do NOT use the word failure. You will be doomed. The corporate style of administration so popular these days cannot tolerate failure. Even learning is suspect. So spin your experience into something positive, hope that the course evaluations aren't too defamatory, and good luck.

6. jmutell - July 21, 2010 at 11:17 am

I agree with @perneb32 and @paul_r: it's not about "failure," it's about asking the right questions. The post meant to give some ideas of the kinds of questions you can ask, but I really like what @perneb32 came up with too for thinking through some of these issues.

Lots of good thinking about it, too, at George's post on course evaluations: thanks for pointing us to it, @delaneykirk!

The point made by @osholes is a really salient one, and one I struggled with a bit in thinking about both the workshop and the post: so many in higher ed do not see "failure" as a productive moment for feedback, as @paul_r commented. And so many are vulnerable, making it difficult to have open conversations about what we're doing. How can we do more to combat that "corporate style" and create a productive space for thinking about strengths and weaknesses as a way of doing better for our students?

7. 12094478 - July 21, 2010 at 02:10 pm

"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."--Samuel Beckett

8. jmutell - July 21, 2010 at 06:08 pm

@12094478 : brilliant!

9. yorklibrary - July 24, 2010 at 07:55 am

This is a place where the dreaded words "Outcomes Assessment" can be useful. While speaking of failure can be death to tenure hopes, discussing a means of looking at outcomes and responding to them with redesign followed by repeat assessment can strengthen a tenure bid. Notice I said looking at outcomes, not measuring them because while numbers can be helpful, they are not the only means of doing this. One of the most humbling and helpful means of assessment I've used is the minute paper asking students to write down the most important thing they learned - often not at all what I intended and really crucial feedback for me. If we build in some of these classroom assessments, we can keep track of what's working and what's not throughout the semester and hopefully avoid some of the end of term angst - for students and for ourselves.

10. chuck - July 28, 2010 at 12:01 pm

Not much about actual failures in here, which I thought was the original question. Are we reluctant to approach that, even here?

Failures, me - tolerating too much marginal behavior from students: lateness of various kinds, for one thing. My tendency is to be too "understanding," which actually hurts them, in not maintaining appropriate standards. I suppose the remedy is easy - stop doing that. But it's almost a reflex, I guess from too much of wanting to be liked. The strength is, perhaps, that I establish rapport with students usually quite easily, and am therefore able to work well with most of them. But the slouches I harm, I believe.
I think that sounds like a simple "failure," but I think education is about helping people to mature, and I don't think I have always done that very well.
Remedy: remind myself of what they really need, and just try to stick to it.
Failure is also kind of humiliating, in that it sometimes identifies a particular character flaw that is unflattering. Oh well.

11. vatnick - August 01, 2010 at 11:36 pm

Words are powerful and failure is not an exception. The point made is well taken -- however I would agree with previous comments that using it in this context, although it is thought provoking, can have unintended consequences that are far reaching.