Overview:
Educators build trust, engagement, and resilience in students by modeling failure, embracing vulnerability, and turning mistakes into learning opportunities.
I am an educator who is also on the autism spectrum. Throw in a hearing impairment and learning disability, my teaching style is bound to be unique. I also have a Master’s Degree rooted in behavioral science, this leads to a tendency to analyze outcomes. One outcome that was of particular significance came out of learning to model failure. It was through learning to fail that I created new ways to build trust with my students. Through vulnerability and letting my own mistakes show, my students became more engaged. When perfection was not required, a new excitement for learning was ignited.
One of the positions I held early in my career was that of a paraprofessional in a classroom on a specialized campus. The school was designed to serve students who were not able to participate in general education classrooms due to the severity of their disability and corresponding challenging behavior. It was in this setting that I became increasingly interested in how different types of engagement worked proactively to diminish the likelihood of challenging behaviors. When working with exceptional learners who display complex behaviors, proactive measures are key. Things like humor, vulnerability, and honesty; can build engagement. In my experience, it is pivotal to incorporate these into everyday routines, with all students, across settings.
While my experience is rooted in a distinct segment of education, the strategies I employ are not limited to exceptional learners. Most were actually taught to me by my mother, a retired kindergarten teacher. I grew up spending afternoons in the classroom with my mom, prepping lessons, making materials, designing bulletin boards. As I grew older I became more active in her classroom. At one point, she worked on the campus I attended as a student, a K-12 charter school. I was a teacher’s helper long before I was ever a teacher. My mom modeled a lot of these strategies, and I applied them to a unique setting. Their success across settings demonstrates their value.
It was on a specialized campus for exceptional learners that I first met Alan*. A student in one of the high school classrooms, Alan was of formidable stature. He was a tall guy with an athletic build, and he could pack a punch. And pack a punch he had, the school year before my arrival. Alan was best known for the injuries he had caused staff, including his teacher’s broken nose. He was the type of student you exercised caution around and constantly considered safety. However, with Alan, as with many of his peers, humor created a pathway to engagement. If I cracked a joke in class and Alan laughed, it was a sign that he was truly engaged and learning. The chuckle from the back of the room became a tool I could use to measure attention and engagement. In this setting, that also equaled safety.
Alan was one of my students who had very limited skills and often preferred to sleep in class. He wasn’t alone in that. The classroom was filled with students who were less than enthusiastic about learning. As high school students with limited academic ability, their cumulative learning history had not been marked by success. These were students who had experienced failure and did not expect to succeed in the future. That would change. Through learning to make mistakes in front of my students, and modeling how to handle not knowing the answer, I built trust. My class became a space where there was no risk of failure; failure was an acceptable option. However, giving up was not.
As an individual with dyslexia, my spelling skills are atrocious. In composing this paragraph, spell check has already corrected me twice. I had serious hesitation when I began working with students on reading and spelling skills, but I went into it with honesty and humility. It made a difference. The day the tide turned for myself, and my students, was the day we realized that collectively we could not spell refrigerator to save our lives. What we could do is laugh at our mistakes and work it out together. Refrigerator, spell check to the rescue yet again.
As part of a spelling lesson, I was giving a pretest to my students. The word refrigerator was universally missed (including me). However, the creativity and humor in the spellings written were fantastic. When I glanced over the answer sheets, I saw a couple of “refrygerators”. The mental image conjured up with this creative spelling was one of a universal appliance that can refrigerate, fry, maybe even sautee. In good humor, I mentioned to my students that I think they have come up with a genius new invention. And although neither myself nor my students had spelled refrigerator correctly, I saw great potential in the “re-fry-gerator” technology. Alan, who was typically fast asleep this far into the lesson, was laughing and talking about our do-it-all appliance brilliance. In fact, everyone was smiling and laughing.
My reading and spelling lessons became a place where even the teacher made mistakes. No one was immune to error, and we all took it in stride. What I viewed as one of my biggest weaknesses, my dyslexia, became one of my biggest strengths. The fact that I was willing to make mistakes alongside my students, handle it with grace, and learn was more impactful than other lessons I taught. Alan, along with his peers, remained engaged in lessons. The sleepy eyes that greeted me in the beginning were replaced with excitement and enthusiasm for learning. What I was naturally doing as a person who struggles with spelling became a pathway to connection and engagement.
When I didn’t know or misspelled a word, I was honest. When a lesson I thought was going to be great bombed, I was honest. I let my students know it didn’t work out as planned; some things just don’t. I modeled what it looks like to not have the answer. To not understand, but to ask the questions and figure it out. Together, as a group, we gained skills. We supported each other and approached barriers with comedy and perseverance.
As educators, we are also human. We have days where things just don’t go as planned. My mother survived 30 years of teaching kindergarten by learning to laugh at herself and her mistakes. When mistakes are made, a misspelled word, a wrong page number, a lamination disaster, or any other hiccup in teaching, there is room in that moment to teach a different lesson. There is room to model failure and how to handle situations that don’t go our way. In doing so you build trusting relationships with your students, who also gain confidence to tackle challenges and risk failure.
Learning to let our mistakes show and not erase them before notice. Learning not to camouflage failure. Learning to be vulnerable. Learning to say “well, that didn’t work out”. These are things we need to model for our students. Model how to fail and how to persevere. The best teachers, in my opinion, are the ones we see as most human. Part of that is learning to laugh at our mistakes and fail miserably, with grace.
