I often think teaching should be an Olympic sport. It takes skill, knowledge of your craft, a lot of practice, dedication, will, and resilience. All these attributes have been on display as the world has watched the games this summer. As a teacher, there are
We all have had that lesson that has not gone the way we anticipated: we set high goals for our students, and whether because of delivery or circumstances out of our control, the lesson failed. We also struggle with failures as we aim to inspire
For me, the move from in-person teaching to asynchronous online teaching took place over decades, but it still presented a challenge that threatened fundamental aspects of my identity as an educator: the dynamic exchange of energy between me and my students and the importance of
As a student, I would often find myself buried in textbooks, meticulously reviewing notes, highlighting my textbook, and relistening to lectures I had recorded only to score an average grade or lower on my exams. At times, it felt like the harder I studied,
Books and journals on college teaching are chock full of best practices, compelling activities, and successful ideas for the classroom. These resources do help, but also helpful are experiences at the unsuccessful end of the teaching spectrum. I am referring to clinkers – those best
Paul Feigenbaum’s article (2021) on failure changed how I think about it. I’ve written a lot about failure—advocating for it and what it contributes to learning—and Feigenbaum agrees: failure plays a powerful role in learning. He calls it “generative failure” and describes it as an
I’m wanting to explore teacher responses to students who, for many reasons, may be slow to learn what we teach, and those who, for other reasons, resist our teaching efforts. I am interested in those students and their responses, but for the moment I’d like
Failure is a regular column topic—specifically, the need for students and their teachers to reorient to it as an opportunity for learning. Our natural inclination makes us want to run from it. We don’t need to intentionally fail; plenty of it happens without intention, and
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