How to Teach Growth Mindset and Failing Forward
Updated February 2024
By Claire Meschkat
Students need to experience failure in our classrooms. They may not think so, but learning from those failures is what helps them grow. Read on for ways to empower your students to learn from their failures, aka. fail forward, with a good dose of growth mindset!
Growth Mindset
Growth Mindset is a belief that abilities can be developed and improved with hard work and dedication. They are not unchangeable traits we are just born with. So how do we impart this belief to our students? Read on for a few tips and strategies.
Show students that the brain grows and so can all the information and abilities in it!
Dr. Blake, who is a motivational speaker who emphasizes a growth mindset, uses a call and response to reiterate this point. He says “When I keep going…” and students respond with, “…my brain keeps growing”. That is the heart of having a growth mindset. I discuss this with my students and talk to them about how their brains are not where they were when they were babies. They grew and they can continue to grow as you work hard and try your best.
Get to the root of the problem of your students’ fixed mindset.
A fixed mindset is a belief that one’s qualities cannot change over time or with effort. Think about why your students may be shutting down instead of pushing forward when facing a challenge or something new to them.
Problem: Do they have time-based anxiety? This one really resonates with me. Students may worry that they do not have enough time to think through the challenge and be successful.
Give them a heads-up in the class before about what challenges or concepts are coming up so they can start thinking about it.
Make sure they have time to test their designs more than once (and that they know they will have multiple trials before even starting the challenge).
Problem: Are they experiencing teammate turmoil? These are problems within student teams, where students are not working well together. Maybe they do not feel heard or students are unable or unwilling to participate within their team.
Overcome this by having the brainstorming or idea phase of the engineering design process done individually, before groups come together and decide on an idea. You could even require that at least one part of each individual’s design idea must be incorporated in the final design.
Make sure you are emphasizing the process and not the product. Make grading reflect the design and teamwork skills as more important than passing the test.
Provide opportunities to practice teamwork skills by changing the student teams for each challenge.
Assign team roles to give each student an individual responsibility within their team to empower them to be successful and contributing members. You may have a data recorder, a timer, a sketcher, or a material scientist (who gathers the supplies).
We must model a growth mindset for our students. Make sure you are positive in the way you talk about things that are difficult. We also want our praise to be specific and focused on the process. Example: “I’m proud that you tried that 5 times!”
Get parents on board with what you are doing too! Consider sending home a handout to clue them in on some ways they can help foster a growth mindset at home when they talk to their children about school.
Implement a classroom management system that rewards a growth mindset. I have an awesome points jar that every time I hear a student encourage their teammates by saying something like, “great thinking on strengthening the base, Mary” or “I love the way to built that bridge, John.” I hand them a pom pom, and they get to add it to the jar. Positive self-talk is another way that they get to add an awesome point to the jar. When the jar fills up, we get to celebrate as a class with a special surprise like candy or a rocket launch. If I hear negative self-talk or discouragement and vocal frustration towards their classmates, I remove awesome points from the jar.
One of the most important ways that you can build a classroom culture of growth mindset, is to not skip the reflection piece after a STEM challenge. Discuss as a class the difficulties and struggles that your students faced and model the posture that should be used with handling those struggles. It is okay to be frustrated, but ask your students about the negative results that may have happened from that frustration and ways that they could handle it differently next time.
Failure
Discussing failure goes hand-in-hand with a growth mindset. While you talk to your students about how to handle frustrations in a challenge, work together to come up with a plan of action for dealing with failure when it occurs. Notice how I didn’t say “if” it occurs? They will and should experience failure in STEM! Here are some tips to help your students embrace, learn from, and move forward after experiencing failure:
Define a classroom goal, such as The goal is for our class to view failure as something to be learned from, not to be embarrassed or ashamed of. Post this somewhere and have your students read it aloud often so that they remember what your classroom goal is that relates to failure.
Define how to start a challenge: Use a learning journey to do a self-assessment of where the starting point is for each student. They can determine how much they know or feel confident about the subject being discussed. This helps them vocalize that they have room to grow and learn and should expect to be challenged that day to help them grow their brains. You could also come up with a phrase that your class uses before you start a challenge like, “we may not be able to complete this yet, but let’s show what we know and build from there”.
Define how to embrace failure: Come up with an action and words to encourage each other. Maybe take a deep breath or clap as a team. Say “that was a great opportunity to learn” or “What could we try next?”. Setting this expectation upfront gives your students something to focus on and trains them to react to their failures in a way that can overcome their overwhelming emotions and frustration in a more positive way.
Look into possible modes of failure for your students to determine how you might diminish types of failure that detract from the learning or are out of students’ control. Some failure modes like this may be:
Failure Mode: running out of time. Have your students do a gallery walk if time is running short. To do this, stop everyone in the middle of building and have each group walk around to look at everyone else's designs and give positive feedback. You then could have students finish in the next class period or have students take it home and complete it on their own time. If you do this, make sure to ask students to reflect on how they could do things differently to work more quickly next time. Plan more? Divide tasks?
Failure Mode: Too much focus on passing the testing phase. Emphasize that the real goal is learning, not passing a test. It’s about progress. This should be reflected in your rubric and verbalized often to your students. If their catapult doesn’t knock over the tower, that is okay. It is more important that they put effort into using the engineering design process, worked well as a team, and stayed on task.
Another thing I have learned when working through failure with my students is this concept of toxic positivity. It is not productive to try to immediately change a student’s emotions when they fail. If they are upset, getting in their face with a big smile, slapping them on the back, and saying “Great job, better luck next time,” will only make things worse. We should help students embrace their emotions and help them process them. Give them space to reflect and ask, “what would you do differently next time”, not better, just differently? Allow them to become self-motivated. We cannot force a growth mindset on them, but we can give them room to be inspired and grow in their own time.
I Failed!
One of the best ways to help your students is to empathize with what they are going through when they fail by practicing failing yourself! Hear all about our experience in doing this in episode 17 and episode 18 of the STEM Space podcast.
My biggest advice to help your students improve at failing forward is to give students lots of opportunities to fail! Like anything, they will improve with practice, so challenge them to do so often. To do this, I not only task them with difficult challenges; I provide challenges that have a twist ending where they are required to fail and learn from previous trials. My favorite example of this is our Lander Challenge. Students have to build a lander to keep astronauts inside. Then they have to use what they learned in their trials of getting their lander to land softly to then sabotage the landing and force the aliens to pop out on impact. Try it out with your students by getting it here, while you talk about how they can succeed at failure!
