Yesterday, I wrote that our education system is the core cause of our young people to be afraid to fail. I wrote, “We need to change direction.” So a savvy reader asked the natural question: “How. How do we change direction?”
I think it’s complex, hard, and worth doing. Here’s how I think various education stakeholders can begin to change the direction of education so that kids are less afraid to fail.
Parents
The change has to start and end with parents. It’s the most important part of the job, and parents have more influence than any teacher or any policy.
- Tell your kids. Tell them every day that you care about their failures, and what they learned from them. Tell them about your own failures. Tell them that those standardized tests aren’t important, that what they got on their history project doesn’t define their value. Tell them that failing is how they learn.
- Inform yourself. Educate yourself about teaching philosophies beyond “achievement at all costs.” Read Diane Ravitch. Read and watch Ken Robinson. Get a taste of Unschooling. Check out Austin Kleon’s books. Print, read, and highlight Seth Godin’s Stop Stealing Dreams.
- Talk to your kids’ teachers. Every time I have a parent/teacher conference, a teacher pulls out the grade book and starts listing scores. I have to interrupt them and say, “I care way less about performance and way more about what you’ve noticed about them as a human being.” (Most teachers want to have this conversation, but most teachers only get asked about grades.) Speaking of grades…
- Stop checking the online gradebook. You can talk about school performance with your kids, but do not make it your job to check. You’ve already finished school, so you shouldn’t worry about whether they’re late turning in their practice log.
- Talk to administration. Gently. They hear a lot of crazy from a lot of parents. Volunteer for boring committees, ask about changes to support kids’ mental health, ask about all the things below. Most of all, support and know that change will be slow.
- Keep reading and learning. None of us has all the answers, but together we can figure it out. I don’t think you can go wrong with any of the books on my Personal Bibliography for education books.
- Keep talking to your kids. Don’t fix their problems when they have them, but sit with them and support them. Do model failure, do talk about how failure is valuable.
Teachers
Talk to your students every day about failure. Have you read Debbie Millman’s book? Model failure, support students who are failing.
I said the other day to my class, “I care more about you learning the material than I do about me spending extra time grading; so you can retake tests as many time as you want until you’re happy with the grade.” Do you offer unlimited retakes?
I’ve seen teachers see a class struggling and reinvent their lesson plans to lift them up. I’ve seen others who are delivering today’s lecture because it’s Day 17 of the Semester – regardless of whether the students understood Day 16’s lecture. Which kind are you?
Speak up for academic support, mental health support, and plenty of time devoted to the meta-lessons students need about success and failure.
Schools
Reinvention is okay. My son’s middle school just added a half-hour of daily intervention, where the students can choose where to go to focus on building on their struggles. It’s this kind of innovation, ignoring “we’ve always done it this way” that’s needed.
Speaking of sticking to old ways, have you reconsidered honor class GPAs? Some students don’t take the best fit classes for them academically, because they don’t want to risk failing (aka a lower GPA). Others drop elective classes without honors inflation, because they don’t want to risk failing (by not getting a beyond-perfect GPA).
I’ve only known one Valedictorian in my life who didn’t fear failure, and make choices to avoid failure. (Hi, Casey!) Is putting the top 10 or 20 kids in a graduating class in that mental state worth it?
P.S. This isn’t directly related, but probably plays a role. I have known so, so many sleep-deprived high school students over the years, because their circadian rhythms make it almost universally hard to sleep when sleep is available to them. Starting high school later would improve high school students’ mental health.
Government
We need to gently reduce specificity in graduation requirements. Let students, parents, and schools figure out what’s best for the students, and reduce the one-size-fits-all approach that leaves many students stressed and afraid.
We need to reduce testing. It doesn’t tell us what we think it tells, it has little to no use in better teaching individual students, which should be the goal, and high stakes testing is one of the main culprits in making students afraid of failing. (Especially when test results, as in some states, are connected to teacher pay and tenure – leading teachers to put profound pressure on their students.)
We need to better pay teachers and support staff. We need more mental health professionals in schools, so teachers aren’t de facto counselors. We need more training and support for teachers to give more whole-child attention to each student. Teachers need way more support, both in terms of staff and finances.
Society
We need to agree that universal public education is one of the best investments we can make in our society’s future.
We need to stop caring about “top 100 school rankings.” They are fake numbers.
We need to stop saying things like, “Well, it was good enough when I was in school.”
We need to stop asking “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and start asking “What do you want to try?” and “What do you want to change?” and “What kind of person do you want to be?”
We need to stop thinking we understand education because we were educated. I couldn’t perform surgery, despite having been operated on, and I can’t write a novel, despite having read hundreds of them.
We need to value learning above all. Learning is messy, and failure is unavoidably part of it.
What’d I miss? Help me make this post more complete – what else can we be doing to help our kids, as stakeholders in the public education system?
This post isn’t about music education, but I wanted to add a postscript to say that I happen to think that group music-making is a pretty fabulous way to practice failure. I haven’t sung or conducted a perfect concert yet, have never led a perfect rehearsal. We practice failing over and over and over again on our way to success, and I don’t know of another part of school where that’s as true.