Students, just like everybody else, can often put themselves under pressure. This pressure can often be associated with a fear of failure. Whether it is making a mistake, getting an unsatisfactory score or some other action which we interpret as failure (and interpretation is important), if we don’t have a healthy relationship with failure, then it can cause all kinds of problems. Failure can stress us out, make us upset, engage in task avoidance, leave us reluctant to volunteer, or number of unhealthy dispositions.
Embracing failure isn’t the same thing as setting out to fail. Nor is being prepared to fail the same as enjoying failure. There is a healthy gap between disliking failure and fearing it; that is the space we need to occupy. Getting students into that space is the challenge.
Just as we want students to copy the thought processes we model, and just as we model behaviour and manners, we also need to explicitly teach the merits of failure and showcase our own fallibility. Students need to see us accept failure and see the steps we take to learn from our failings. We can also share the famous stories of failure from historical figures, in all walks of life and civilisation, which illustrate that figures nearly always associated with success benefited from making mistakes.
Commonplace 