Teaching Failure: When Imperfection Becomes the Perfect Learning Opportunity

This workshop will explore two related questions: How do we experience, work through, and learn from failures in our teaching? And how can we teach our students to experience, work through, and learn from their own failures? We suspect that openly sharing and reflecting on our own experiences of teaching failure will help us gain insight into our students’ experience of failure, so we can encourage students to persevere and work through the setbacks they will inevitably encounter in their academic, personal, and professional lives. By the end of this session, participants will: (i) feel less isolated, in that they are not alone in encountering obstacles in their teaching; (ii) have strategies to learn from, respond to, and build upon their own teaching failures; and (iii) be more ready to help their students be resilient to, and learn from, failure.