Teaching to Fail

The “Failure” keyword of the Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities collection includes the “Teaching to Fail” artifact, which is derived from an essay by Edward Burger. His pedagogy is based on acknowledging, rewarding, building on, and celebrating failure in a variety of ways. In order to destigmatize–even encourage–failure in the classroom, Burger bases 5% of his students’ final grades on their “quality of failure.”  Grading students on failing throughout the semester encourages them to share their mistakes rather than hiding them–and encourages them feel free to make more mistakes in the first place.

For certain essay assignments, he instructs students to “intentionally fail–in the spirit of an industrial stress test” by first having write a first draft of an essay “very quickly and poorly” long before it’s due and also submitting their marked-up second-to-last draft with the final one.

That 5% “quality of failure” grade is based on several factors:

In the case of assessing “quality of failure,” at the end of the semester I ask my students to write a one-page reflective essay describing their productive failure in the course and how they have grown from those episodes (which might have occurred outside of class — including false starts and fruitful iterations). They conclude their essay by providing their own grade on how they have evolved through failure and mistakes (from 0 – meaning “I never failed” or “I learned nothing from failing” to 10 – meaning “I created and understood in profound, new ways from my failed attempts”). I read their narratives, reflect on their class participation and willingness to take risks, and then usually award them the surprisingly honest and restrained grades they gave themselves. To date, I’ve never had a student complain about their “quality of failure” grade.

Burger’s approach of teaching failure isn’t specifically related to dh. However, it is often impossible to learn how to use digital tools effectively without reaching failure or limit states. Rewarding failure through grading practices makes the value of failure tangible to students who might otherwise fear reaching the limits of digital tools and processes.

I don’t necessarily intend to bake failure into my syllabus. However, crafting assignments so that students are not just set up to fail but intend to fail seems very productive to me. I don’t want to toy with my students. Kobayashi Maru style tricks are against my teaching philosophy, but desmystifying writing and critical practices is very much part of it. Making “failure” –something that students are conditioned to avoid more than anything else — a part of the classroom conversation in a positive way seems deeply productive.