On Failure

Q: How much failure is acceptable? How much can you chalk up to "being a first year teacher" and what needs to be viewed as simply bad practice? How do you know the difference? What should one expect from one's self during the first year in the classroom?


Jack: Lots of failure is acceptable. It has to be for two reasons. First, if you don't accept major amounts of failure, you're going to be totally miserable all year and perhaps quit teaching. Some new teachers (like me for my first semester as a teacher) don't know enough to see that they're failing in major ways, and that can be a good thing. At the end of the year, or earlier, you recognize how far short you fell in so many areas, and you make corrections and move on.

You also, however, have to recognize the failures and not simply plough confidently ahead. No first year teacher is a good teacher. No second year teacher is a very good teacher. No third year teacher is a great teacher. And that's important to recognize.

In short, there has to be a balance, a delicate one at that, between recognizing failure and accepting it. For me, the best way of thinking about it was to do the best I could and not be critical of myself until the end of the marking period. In the break between quarters, I'd spend a lot of time thinking about what went wrong, what didn't work like I thought it would, and what succeeded. And then, I'd adjust my plans for the next quarter, trying to write into myoutline for lessons reminders about what I needed to change; of course, by the time I had written them down, I understood them well enough to not need a reminder.

At the end of my first year teaching, I thought I had done pretty well. At the end of my second year teaching, I looked back at my first year and thought it had been average. At the end of my third year, that first year looked pretty weak. But that meant that where I was my third year was a lot closer to my vision of good teaching, and that felt great.


Douglas: Before anything, you need to establish a clear sense of what you think effective teaching is. Get out a sheet a paper and elucidate four or five principles of what makes good teaching toyou. It may be timely feedback, positive discipline, creating a safe learning environment, cultivating curiosity, developing logical reasoning… whatever combination ofcharacteristics good teaching is, write it down. As you go through your career, you’ll probably hone your principles but the point your first year is to simply have them.

If you’ve been intentional about what you think good teaching is, my guess is that you’ll be pretty effective. Your first year, and indeed the rest of your teaching career, is a laboratory to see which techniques and methods work towards promoting your teaching goals. The key is: be consistent on your principles, adjust your practices to fit. Pay attention to what didn’t work. Those failures and how you deal with them are essential to being a good teacher. After all, rare are the days that absolutely everything goes right in a class. So recognizing what’s not working and figuring out how to save it an important skill you’ll learn too.

The only first-year teacher that I would consider an actual failure is one who didn’t know whatshe/he was trying to accomplish and wasn’t paying attention to see if her/his practices were effective or not. Those people probably aren’t really trying. If you’ve articulated what you think good teaching is and been mindful to see if practices work, I believe that (1) you’ll have a real sense of accomplishment by year’s end and (2) you’ll have been actually pretty effective.


Moses: Feeling like a failure comes from caring about the job that you're trying to do, and from doubting the job that you just did. I also think good teachers are the ones who do both of those, that the teachers who don't open themselves up to feeling like a failure who are the bad ones. So how do good teachers survive? It seems like a cruel paradox.

There is no absolute answer to the first original question - how many units of failure are OK and how many aren't. I think the questions later in the list (what can you expect of yourself, how do you tell good failures from bad) are the real ones: how you take the inevitable failures and allow them to turn you into a better teacher?

The answer, for me, lies in structures. By structures, I mean regular elements of your profession as a teacher that give you some check against reality. Those can be internal: in my first year, I got huge mileage out of daily journal writings because by putting my day, experience, and thoughts down onto the page, I was able to step back and see a little more clearly. Or they can be external: now I do almost all of my processing by talking to my peers about teaching. I need some structures to hold me accountable and to ground me. I also loved the suggestion of trying to lay your priorities out clearly...I just did that for the first time this year and am finding that it makes success feel much more manageable.

Lastly, I think some of that grounding can and must come from the kids. I wrestle with that a lot, because I don't think you can trust their comments entirely: they want different things or sometimes see them narrowly or still have some growing up to do. In some fundamental way, though, I trust them: if they say I'm boring, then I probably am. Grains of salt all over the place...but taking feedback from the kids and honestly considering it is another way I can feel like I'm making progress as a teacher, turning my failures into successes.

The specter and possibility of teaching never goes away: I don't think I feel failure much less now (as a 6th year teacher) then I did as a first year teacher. But I think today failure is a pockmark instead of a crater in my self-image: that I have some more perspective about who I am as a teacher. Being open-hearted and -minded, thoughtful about your practice is no small task, but I think it's my answer to many of the questions asked.