Students Gotta Mess Up
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Why do post-secondary students need more room to mess up?
neutral zone, where every perspective gets diplomatic immunity. This is The Last Show with David Cooper.
Universities often preach that failure is the most useful teacher, that failing is a part of learning, a noble right of passage. But try telling that to a first-year student whose GPA, whose scholarships, and whose future plans can implode after one bad midterm. Are we designing universities where students are too scared to fail? Probably. And I'm here with John McLaughlin, an earth sciences professor at McMaster University in Ontario to discuss this. John, welcome to the show.
Hi, good morning. Thanks for having me.
Teachers, universities, anyone advising a student would probably say failure is a part of learning. But how that actually plays out with kids, there's a bit of a breakdown. What do you find when you tell students, hey, it's OK, you got an F on that midterm?
For so many students, we bring them through a system where there's no structure for failure. We tell them all the time, you need to fail. We tell even little kids, you need to learn through failing, try and try again. But in reality, when they get to university, all of a sudden, it might be the first time they've truly failed at something that impacts them. So all of a sudden, we have these many students, the first time they've ever truly failed something is at a university level. And it just impacts them. It brings forth anxiety. It brings forth these things that are fear that's really understandable considering the stakes that we've put on marks and grades and all these things.
But isn't facing consequences and shifting plans and your life not going the way you wanted it to go, isn't that a part of the learnings of failure? Isn't that maybe like a good thing? Or is the argument we just wish they'd experienced that before that first bad midterm?
No, I think the idea is that they need to experience failure. I think you're 100% correct. But I think the idea is that we want them to experience at a time and a place where they can recover from it.
How does failure impact students' mental health and academic performance?
Why should some small piece of failure impact them for a permanent amount of time? Think of how we have students working now. They want to go to medical school and they need essentially a perfect average. They want to get into engineering at a good school like Toronto. And all of a sudden, they need to have a near perfect average. And they live in this fear and this idea that if they screw up once, they're not going to get into those programs. And that's really difficult for them and their families.
And that feeling of not being smart enough, not being good enough, that's probably not the right attitude to take when you fail. A better attitude or a better frame might be like, oh, I need to try something different. I need to do something differently here.
100%. And sometimes we have to remember, they just have a bad day. We've all had bad days. You show up to a midterm, something has happened, you didn't get enough sleep, and you just didn't do that well.
What are the consequences of failing for first-year students?
find a final exam maybe they've worked through and they should be a little more prepared but things within the middle these formative studies things that you're kind of learning this progressive learning should we be failing that should we give people the chance to see where they need to get better before we start assessing their mastery of something like are they really good enough to do it if i got an engineer building a bridge i just wouldn't be able to build the bridge at the end i don't really care if he failed a calculus test in first year so how do we get there
I was reading an article that you wrote and there was this line in it, this idea of like needing to learn how to fail well. What would that look like in practice? Teach me how to fail well.
I think the idea of learning to fail well is using failure to understand where your weaknesses are. If you're doing any sort of chemistry experiment, you go, I'm really not good at mixing with reagents or using the pipette or any of the fancy equipment. And you do your experiment and you don't do it well.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
Why do post-secondary students need more room to mess up?
0:08–2:10
2
How does failure impact students' mental health and academic performance?
2:10–2:57
3
What are the consequences of failing for first-year students?
2:57–4:54
4
How can universities create an environment that encourages learning from failure?
4:54–10:07
Speakers
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