Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blueprint brought to you by Brilliant Pathways. I'm your host, Manny Tejeda. In this Forward Thinking podcast, we explore the evolving challenges and opportunities in preparing students for college and career success, offering expert insights, actionable strategies and real life stories to help listeners better support young people as they draw their future.
Welcome back, everyone. Today's episode is really about a mindset shift that we all need. It's seeing failure not as a personal flaw, but as a valuable set of information.
Too many young people internalize setbacks as I'm a failure. Instead, this strategy didn't work.
You should be saying what should be next. We're going to talk about how to treat failure as a source of failure feedback and information and pointing us in the way forward rather than shutting down hope.
So. Today I'm welcomed and joined by Ray McNulty, who's a senior fellow for Thought Leadership at the Successful Practices Network SPN.
Ray has been an educator since 1973, serving in various roles from teacher to assistant principal, principal, superintendent, and even serving as Vermont's Education Commissioner, where during his tenure he focused on aligning the Department of Education's work on three key issues. Early education, educator quality, and secondary school reform. Ray, welcome to the Blueprint. It's an honor to have you here.
[00:01:38] Speaker B: Well, it's really, it's an honor for me to be here with you. And you know, we've done some work together in the past and, and I just admire the things that go on and brilliant pathways and the work that you guys do. So it's fun to be here today. It's an honor for me to be able to share some conversation and thoughts about the importance of failure.
[00:01:58] Speaker A: Yeah. So, Ray, in many of our conversations, we always talk about kind of the future.
And that's also always been kind of a tenant in your conversations with. Why do you think so many people equate failure with their identity and what's a better way forward?
[00:02:17] Speaker B: You know, the, the, the whole concept of, of failure and being attached to somebody like, you know, I failed, so I'm terrible is, you know, it's something that, you know, comes, it grows with us when, when we're very young, when young children are doing things, you know, a toddler, they're praised for things that they do well. And, and that, that kind of starts to reveal that, you know, failure is, you're crossing the line to something that's, that's not important.
And, and so they, you know, our minds feel things and so we believe that success is, is what it's all about. It's just, you get. You feel better from that. And, and in fact, what they find is, is that the neuroscientists find this anyway. Is that the error signal in our brain, it activates a stronger synaptic connection than success does. But when our children are young, they get a lot of those that praise, and praise becomes something they're really happy about. They. They smile about. And in school, you know, when I, When I think about my grandchildren, when they want to play school, someone immediately jumps to the role of teacher and grabs a red pen and they're like five years old, but there's like, I'm in charge and I know what's best, and all I care about is you doing the right things and not the wrong things. And we have a right and wrong versus a right, and not yet.
It's like we make things wrong. When, you know, you. When your babies first tried to walk, they fell, and the child didn't say, oh, hell, I don't want to try this walking stuff anymore, right? They recover and they get up and they show resilience, and they push and they push, and we praise them for that, right? When they fall, we pick them up. And, you know, in education, we have to start to think about that at a much higher level because what we do know is that our, the brain learns more from failure than it does when it answers a question, right?
And it's. And that's, that's the strict neuroscience kind of issue. And, you know, the whole concept that we want our children to be resilient and strong, if we want them to be that, then, you know, resilience isn't built by protecting our kids, and it's, it's built by supporting them. Not protecting them, but supporting them. So when something goes wrong, you know, you have a sense, right? A sense of, you know, well, what didn't work and what should we do to make it work? Rather than, you're wrong, right? So identify what didn't work, and then what will we do to make it work? And with a lot of students and a lot of children, it's about practice.
And we see, we see more of that in education now. We see teachers being trained to get away from that concept that failure is not good. Because, quite frankly, the business world is one of the leaders in this, and they want people that have overcome failure.
We just don't seem to position ourselves effectively for that. But I think that's one of the real keys, is that we play like the world is a right and wrong Will.
And it's, you know, it's only wrong if you stop if you don't want to make it better, if you don't want, you know, you don't want to achieve something.
I watch students and when I was a dean at Southern New Hampshire University, I watched a lot of our students that were in the gaming world and they were, there was a gaming program at the university and they would design games and, and you watch students playing a video game, they don't mind making an error as soon as they make an error in a game. Minnie. And I don't know about you, but I hear kids going, I know what now I shouldn't do.
That's learning.
Failure is a part of learning.
It's not the absence of learning. It's a piece of learning.
And we see it when we watch athletic games. The coaches build a plan for the game, then they run the first play and they realize they got to change the plan.
They didn't fail. They realized now what do we have to do to be successful? Right. We thought that was going to work. It didn't. So now what are we going to do to be successful? So it's a whole different thought about how we look at this work. So does that make any sense to you?
[00:06:57] Speaker A: Absolutely, absolutely. And I think it walk us through kind of, you know, from beginning ages to, you know, later on. And I think that the research shows a little bit about the anxiety that, you know, young adults face to when they get to college. And we'll get to that in a second. But I think I want to highlight a couple of stories about obviously we're all familiar with the, with the Thomas Edison inventing the light bulb he talks about. I didn't fail many times. I just learned different ways of not getting to the goal. Right. Or Michael Jordan not making it to his high school varsity team. You know, there's something about that persistent piece that you talk about, but I think it's really just a setback in the heart of the long term achievement. So as you know, one of the essential skills that we have at, at brilliant pathways is, is that goal setting. And I think bringing it into failure really puts it into perspective because then it touches upon the other piece of the perseverance. Right. Like how do you keep going?
How do you use that not yet mentality. Right.
And I think if it's okay with you, I would like to talk a little bit about how do we do that in education, Right. Obviously our audience being educators, parents. So with that frame of mind, knowing that when we experience failure and we learn from it, and we get those aha moments, like whether you're playing video games or what have you allows you to be more resilient. It increases your ability to take risks, and it could reduce anxiety because you're not playing in a field of uncertainty. You've experienced what it is to fail. Now you're looking for the next one, which is, what's the experience of winning? Right?
[00:08:53] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it is. And, and, you know, there's this concept of what they call failure framed classrooms, right, where they normalize feedback as a mechanism to have higher levels of creativity, collaboration, and confidence in the students by not talking about failure, but framing it, that this is part of learning. If you don't fail, all you're doing is.
Is regurgitating information, you know, out of your head so you're not getting any smarter. You're not picking up anything new when you could just give the right answers all the time. You haven't struggled. You haven't really had to think deeply. Because when you, when you start thinking deeply, your brain holds onto it and starts building connections. And what happens is you take things that you learned earlier and you start to group them together. And the neuroscientists talk about this. You, you group it together, and then you gain new knowledge. And when you gain the new knowledge, right, particularly after you failed and you gain the new knowledge, it's. It's a giant stimulus to the brain. It's like, yeah, baby, I got it. You know, and I didn't get it right away, but I got it now. I've got it. I can do it. And, and that's, that's, that's the sense of a growth mindset. Carolyn Dweck's work, right, Shows that effort and that and the strategy and the process of persevering in a classroom.
And we seem to, we have classrooms that are designed where a teacher asks a question and the hands go up. They know it. Those aren't. That they should say, put your hand up if you already know it. I'm going to just call on the other kids, right, Because I want them to understand.
It's like, you know, it's better when nobody's hand goes up and say, well, you can start saying to them, well, what makes sense? What are the thing. What are your guesses about what this is?
Let's talk about that. So, you know, it's, it's a different culture of trying to, by the way, and the other part of the research talks about how much teachers love it when the kids get the answers right.
And the faster they get them right, the quicker they believe that they've educated these kids. Well, we haven't, because they already knew it.
And so the concept of building lessons, I see some great work going on by some teachers that I work with around the country, where what they do is they start by, instead of doing a giant lesson and teaching everything they ask the students, maybe you're going to do something about. I'm just going to pick the Korean War. I don't know as much about the Korean one. And I might say to them, we have to learn about this Korean War. And so I have these questions. I don't really know the answers to them yet. And that's the teacher talking. So what I'd love you to do is partner up with people in the classroom and let's take 30 minutes and let's, you know, get online and let's see what you can put together. What can you find out about this? And they start digging. They'll find things that are not correct, and they'll find things that are correct. And you get them to start to share it, and you have a conversation. And then some students or my. I looked up and I didn't get that. I got this say, oh, that's interesting. Where did you get your information? Where did you get yours? And they put it together. The teacher guides the process of learning where they've got good information and bad information, and you blend it together and you figure out what's right and what's not, and they start to emerge as real thinkers. And they. And they value learning much more when they get it themselves rather than you teaching it to them. Because the. The object of the. Not the object, but the aim of the teacher is to not have the kids to need them.
We want our students to be learners, not content specialists that just memorize things. We want them to be learners. And so the key.
When I think about brilliant pathways and the work you all do, and I think about this, I think it's a quote I've been playing with this morning.
Failure isn't the opposite of success.
It's the pathway to it.
That's a brilliant position to be in. That failure is a stop along the road to success, the pathway to where you want to go. And by the way, when you work with students. And one of the wonderful things that I see you all doing is helping kids build goals and directions for their future.
And some of the work I've been looking at will say, are they. Are they building Three pathways, you know, or just one pathway. Because what happens when they have a pathway that they start to not, you know, make a connection to? And so what should they do? So is there a backup on airplanes and on, you know, space vehicles? They have five and six backup systems on everything. So if something doesn't work, the next one is. So do our kids have backup positions?
When I was the chief learning officer at Penn Foster, which is a global online learning platform, it's interesting that we were training vet technicians in. In the system, and what we found was a lot of vet tech students that want to be a vet tech love animals. But the first time they got to stick a needle in it, they're like, I don't want to hurt the animal. Well, then you might want to be a receptionist at the veterinarian's office rather than of that tech. So do you have a backup plan? And a lot of the people say, you're right.
There's no way I can. You know, when I see a cat that's been, you know, hit by a car, I cry. I can't fix it. I. I can't do anything to it. Okay, so you. You love animals. You need. You want a job that involves animals, but it's not being a vet, right? Or it's not being a vet tech. It's being something else in the office that could be helpful. So having. When we talk about goals and pathways, we need to.
I think one of the things we need to do is have students prepare themselves for maybe two or three different concepts so that they have backups that. I think a lot of students do it anyway when they decide that they want to go to college, they have, like, their number one. Then they have like 10 other colleges that say, well, these are my backup positions.
Because maybe, maybe at some times it might be something that's more challenging because you can't get beyond this. And having a backup plan again brings success to the opportunity.
So that's one of the things I think that's important for us to think about.
And I also think about the idea. Thinking about students are best when mistakes don't lead to shame.
And. And that's something else that I see in schools where they see failure as shameful in a class.
And educators need to be able to have language that they could use to.
[00:15:51] Speaker A: To.
[00:15:52] Speaker B: To correct that, to basically say, you don't have it yet, but you're really close.
All right, let's. Let's. And then lead them through a process. But instead of saying, no, know that's not the answer. It's like getting there, you know, or that would be the answer if I'd asked this question. But let's see where we can take. Where we can take it now in training our educators to deal with failure and making failure, the process, the piece that is part of learning. Again, because you don't have that knowledge in your head right yet. So don't expect them to give you a perfect answer. How do you guide and support those children, those students that have that? So that's. That's some more important things that we should see in our schools.
[00:16:35] Speaker A: Yeah, I think those are key. I think that the modeling of. Of the learning right from the teacher's perspective, you know, let's learn together that feedback piece. It's critical. Don't shame. Provide feedback and then allowing students to really explore different pathways.
But perhaps they start with that, vet tech, and they expand from there to see what works and what. But more importantly, what doesn't work. Right. And understand why that. I think that it's a really interesting way to really get them engaged. And I think that's what we want to do. Right. And especially in schools, you know, a student who always gets the A's, you know, might not be the most engaged.
Right. But more importantly, they don't know. One thing, which you and I have talked a lot about is they don't know how to fail. What do they do when they fail? And I think that has greater repercussions as they move on with their lives, whether it be college or career.
So I think it's really important for them to. To really experience those things early on and get that feedback rather than that shame, so that they can create better paths for themselves.
[00:17:56] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I think there's many educators were trained in systems that equated rigor with right answers, you know, instead of letting students fail and letting them go and kind of leading them to an answer rather than just, you know, then just. I'm just asking him tougher questions. It's like, no, don't. Don't be. You know, we shouldn't be shy about letting our students engage in some failure and then figure that. Figure with them, like, you know, what it. What it's like to get. To take out. You know, what is it like to get out of that? Like, you know, we see our students being protected from failure all over the place now, and we need them. We need to prepare them so that they can work through failure and not have it be as you said, you know, there's a Lot of stress in school for grades, and you name it, we've got to start to back off a little bit in that.
Yeah. Anyway, I, I do think Manny. And you know, and in the work that you all do, and when I, When I think about how we can guide students that are looking for that.
That future that they. They want to excel in is that they have to realize that in order to get there, the pathway goes through a lot of failure and a lot of challenges. But the more we see them and, you know, people talk always they use the term failing forward, and I get that, but I think teachers need to have that, you know, when, when something failed. Well, what worked in this and. And what didn't work and, you know, what will you try next? And kind of, we, as educators, coaching them with the kind of questions that are not shameful questions. They're just questions that help them think differently about what failure is. Failure in learning is not.
It's not conclusive. It's. It's something you can overcome.
[00:20:01] Speaker A: Right. And they don't. It's only failure if you stop, like you said. Right.
[00:20:05] Speaker B: It's only failure if you don't. Yeah. If you decide. No, I mean, when you get to a red light and you don't want to go anymore and just stop. Right. You're not going to go anywhere. Right. So red lights make you stop and green lights make you go. And it's like, how do we build more green lights when, you know, when there's some experience that might have been, you know, a challenge? You know, failure isn't the opposite of success. As I said earlier, it's the pathway to success.
It's, it's. And too often, I think, again, we get the. That remark I made earlier about, you know, if they already know it, then they're not learning. They're just repeating what they know. They don't learn anything. Right. They already knew it. So we have to get to the point of stressing, stretching everybody and all of our kids need to see everybody experiencing, you know, that challenge.
[00:20:56] Speaker A: Absolutely. So it sounds like it's time to rewrite our script on failure. It's not a label. It's raw material for growth. And you know, that growth mindset is very important. Every attempt, even the ones you missed, that's great information. It's. It's really going to help you on the next one. So I, I got a challenge for our audience. I want them to, to do what, what you, you. What you said, Ray. It's kind of that model, that learning. Let's say next time you don't know something and you're in a group, go and chat and try to get as much information and try to get to whether it be a solution or find the answers. And in that process, you're helping the group kind of identify, you know, and test their knowledge and brainstorm better alternatives for a better approach for next time. And this doesn't matter if you're a teacher, you're a parent or a coach.
Modeling is really a nice way for you to think out loud of your process because that's where they're learning will really happen. So aside from that, obviously the teaching of the agility, creativity and perseverance, you know, will help them build confidence for a lifetime. And you know, I think as at Brilliant Pathways, that's what we want to do with the essential skills. So just want to thank everyone for, for staying and letting the blueprint be part of their growth journey and let's build a future where failure fuels learning and nobody lets mistakes kind of set back or what have you kind of determine their self worth. So I'm Manny Tejeda. See you next time.
Support for this podcast comes from Brilliant Pathways, an organization that had spent over 30 years helping students make opportunities. Opportunities happen.
Connect with us wherever you get your podcasts and thank you for joining us on the blueprint. I'm Manny Tejeda, your host and I'll see you next time.
