Teachers and the No-Fail Mission

 

 

"He is the nicest person and gives the best constructive criticism... he's a teacher that doesn't give us the option to fail, only tells us how to succeed," she said.

 

 

Failure is a loaded term.

 

There are those who disdain feel-good marks and "cushioning" students from bad marks.  Failing, these people say, pushes people to work harder. 

 

Sometimes this is true - but sometimes, it encourages people to think different.

 

Standardized tests aren't about teaching students, but about rating students.  Standardized education is, likewise, about turning out a few narrow streams of workers - applied vs advanced, arts vs sciences, so on and so forth.

 

Life, however, is not so linear.  Not any more, at any rate.  It's unreasonable to expect any student to get boxed by school, shipped off to a career path and stay there until retirement.  The world doesn't operate that way, and hasn't for a long while.

 

This is why a rebranding of failure is necessary - it's not about demarcating students, any more than it should be about eliminating competitors.  Failure, pure and simple, is about adaptation.  You need to make mistakes, plenty of them, and develop intuition about how to handle failure, how to learn from failure and how to adapt for success. 

 

It's not a one-off process, this; life is a constant battle of adaptation, skill-building and communication.

 

Slowly but surely, leaders are cluing in to this new reality and adapting their own management practices to benefit from the social evolutionary wisdom of behavioural insight.

 

Which is why the best leaders are acting less like managers and more like teachers.

The smart leaders are cluing in to something similar - it's not tough bosses that students will promote of their own volition, but their educators.