As the saying goes:

“If at first you don’t succeed… try, try again!”

Working with students, what you sometimes see is:

“If at first you don’t succeed… quit before someone sees you fail.” Or, “If at first you don’t succeed… avoid trying altogether.”

What the saying should say:

“If at first you don’t succeed… try, something different.” (Try a different approach, don’t just try the same thing over again in the same way.)

When things aren’t working, students seem to have two main gears: keep moving forward, because curiosity points to getting unstuck. Or ‘Park’ because it’s not worth the effort or embarrassment.

Teaching students that effort matters more than results or that a failing result can still be a learning opportunity, is to teach them to be resilient and to persevere. This doesn’t mean everyone gets a participation badge, this isn’t just about another quote, “If you did your best, that’s all that really matters.”

No, this is about creating an environment where students aren’t afraid to bite off more than they can chew… to be so ambitious about their goals that a failure to achieve them still puts students much farther than if they had set the bar too low and succeeded.

This is about creating opportunities for students to do something epic, rather than just something every other kid is doing, with a sample you share of the expected result… a cookie cutter task where students produce the same round cookies, but get to decide where the pretty sprinkles go to make their cookie look a little different than everyone else’s.

If you want students to really succeed, well then they have to start a task with the real potential for failure. They have to struggle with uncertainty of success. They have to learn that not reaching a perfectly successful goal can be an opportunity to learn more and different things. Because without authentic struggle, learning is shallow and fleeting.

“If at first you do succeed… the task probably wasn’t hard enough to truly learn something new.”

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