Flipping the Mindset: Reframing Fear and Failure to Catalyze Development

Abstract

Despite the attempts to target success and predisposition to taking risks to promote innovation, sometimes educational developers encounter moments where they fail to meet expectations set forth—by their institutions, colleagues, or themselves. Attempts to avoid potential failures can stymie the creative process, preventing them from meeting difficult challenges. What can be done to catalyze useful responses to failure when events and interactions do not go according to plan? Most researchers suggest reflecting on the failure in order to grow. To assist, a field‐tested reflective process (the IDeAS process) that helps flip the approach to failure and move toward the freedom to risk was developed.

Az iskolai kudarcok tényezői – egy lehetséges preventív modell keretei

“…A fejlődési mindset mediátorszerepet tölt be abban, hogy kudarc után a diák megtartsa célorientációját (Song et al, 2020). Mivel a fejlődési szemlélettel rendelkező diákok a kudarcot tanulási lehetőségnek tekintik, őket a kudarc motiválhatja és magasabb teljesítményre sarkallhatja (Boyd et al, 2015). Mindezzel szemben több kutató (pl.…”

Responding to Failure: A Transformative Process

“…Rumination that remains individualistic and internalized can be detrimental, especially, for those with self-criticism pathology (Rahamim et al, 2016) or unhealthy motivational drives (Parker & Martin, 2011). It can also be difficult for those with a fixed mindset (Boyd et al, 2015), but beneficial for those with a growth mindset resulting in spiritual intelligence (Tedeschi & Triplett, 2012). As the research of Moser et al (2011) discovered, "The finding that mind-set was associated with both positive and negative responses to error suggest that a growth mindset is specifically associated with enhanced mediated error processing" (p. 1488).…”

“…Therefore, one must not simply avoid failure, nor merely self-ruminate, but rather learn and grow from it. As Boyd et al (2015) state, "when we avoid the risk of failure and all its attendant adrenaline, we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to learn and grow. We need to be willing to fail in order to thrive" (p. 11).…”

“…A possible help to this end is redefining and reimagining the failure-event. Near the conclusion of their study on failure, Boyd et al (2015) observed, As one might imagine, participants use colorful language to describe the shame, sadness, disappointment, and fear associated with failure. At the conclusion of the workshop, we asked participants to close their eyes, revisit those responses, and imagine instead that the prompt was "How does it feel to learn?"…”

“…" (p. 11) Much that is defined as failure is due to the "conventional nature of expectations" (Kleinig, 2012, p. 1368), whereas O'Donnell (2014 encourages a reimagining of conventional understandings of success and failure, "so that failure might come to be understood not as being a failure and as a deficit of being… but in terms of the activity of failing" (p. 267). Here productive failure can become a space to achieve optimal learning (Kapur, 2016, p. 296), as people employ reflective strategies, both individual and collaborative (Bast & Barnes-Holmes, 2015;Boyd et al, 2015).…”