Intelligent Failure

By Laura Moore

When the bell rings for lunch, most students flood the parking lots and sidewalks, making their way home, or to any number of local eating establishments. Some stay behind in the cafeteria, others dive into their studies in the library and a few others crowd around the auditorium lobby, lounging on couches, munching on food, diving into pop culture analyses, high school drama, or philosophical bantering.

Last Friday, however, Upper Arlington High School's Community School students were gathered in the orchestra room, engaging in an emergency class forum run by the student "chair" they elected to lead them.

This emergency meeting occurred three days into their new unit, but the process that brought them to that point started a few weeks before when their language arts teacher, Melissa Hasebrook, charged them with a mission to brainstorm ideas for the next unit. Beginning with passion and curiosity, students listed ideas they had interest in studying. Then, they gathered in groups with others who shared that interest so they could explore it, identify essential questions about it, and locate both potential book titles as well as satellite texts (movies, TV shows, articles, artwork) and accompanying visuals for analysis (comics, posters, memes).

The set up sounds like a dream for students, but having been in the classroom for twelve years, I will admit that my palms grew misty just imagining all of the potential ways this openness and freedom could travel off course. See, while student choice is important, I know it can also be dangerous. It can lead to inappropriate pursuits or undesired outcomes. It can make people uncomfortable.

But it can also lead to tremendously valuable learning.

And that's exactly what happened in Hasebrook's class.

As student groups formed and energy built, it became obvious that there was tremendous interest in the development of a unit focusing on serial killers.

Hasebrook said there were about five students who had sincere interest, but they were able to bring their peers on board and after three rounds of voting, three classes landed on this topic as the one they wanted to pursue. The process itself was lengthy: students were tasked with developing their position with research and then presenting those ideas in front of the class. Hasebrook recorded the presentations and posted them on the class Schoology page. Once all ideas were presented, students picked the top three, whittling the field to 10 and then they voted once more, narrowing the field to four. Once the final four ideas were identified, they voted one final time, arriving at the unit they most wanted to pursue.

While kids have always been fascinated by fringe ideas, Hasebrook said this was the first time a group managed to get a fringe idea through and win. And when such a reality unfolded, she said she had to make a decision about how to handle it. Should she stop it before it started and give them the unit she wanted to teach or should she honor their wishes and forge onward?

True to her commitment to giving students experiences that enable them to learn authentically, she decided to let her students learn, to let them wrestle with their decision, to let them find their way out of where they managed to land.

At first, only four students approached her with concerns and she worked with them to design an alternative unit that explored how story impacts an understanding of the world. But as students started reading, the group of four grew. Parents expressed concern, people started having nightmares, regret started creeping through the cracks.

Mrs. Hasebrook spoke with the chair and vice chair and they decided to call a meeting with all three classes. At that meeting--which occurred during lunch--a room packed with students shared their positions. As each person spoke--facilitated by an intentional, methodical process led by a student-appointed chair--the room listened.

Even though some students still felt passionately about going on with the chosen unit, 50% felt uncomfortable; therefore, the group decided to halt its progress, to go back to the drawing board with new unit ideas, and over the weekend, they had three rounds of voting, rounds that landed them on Kafka and his novel The Trial. 

Some naysayers might look at this particular lesson and scold the power of student choice, but I look at it as a prime example of what Amy Edmondson calls intelligent failure in her Harvard Business Review article "Strategies for Learning from Failure." In this piece, she asserts that "failure resulting from thoughtful experimentation that generates valuable information may actually be praiseworthy."  She says intelligent failure "occur[s] when experimentation is necessary: when answers are not knowable in advance because this exact situation hasn't been encountered before and perhaps never will again."

This particular "failure" was intelligent because the effect of these students' choice was not knowable in advance for them. But, by being allowed to go through the process--by being allowed to actually live with this particular choice--these students learned, very deeply, about the weight of it. In a safe space, they got to see how individual choice can impact others in real and powerful ways. They learned to speak up and out. They learned to respectfully listen, to come together, to build unity despite differences. Instead of being told why that's important, over the course of a few days, students learned a lesson wider-reaching than the Common Core could ever hope to go. They learned that while the freedom of choice is empowering, it comes with real consequences. They learned that certain things cause visceral reactions in others. They learned how to manage their emotions and how to feel a sense of responsibility to members of a community.

And they learned all of this because Hasebrook let them.

She didn't issue blame. She didn't demean their curiosity. She didn't stop their progress and save them with the answer. She let them feel and dig and empathize. She let them wrestle with a challenging predicament and learn how to be civically-responsible beings. And then, she let them find their way out.

In the opening lines of her article, Edmondson tells us that "the wisdom of learning from failure is incontrovertible. Yet the organizations who do it well are extraordinarily rare."

We, at Upper Arlington High School want to be one of those organizations.

And while there are countless other examples of how we experiment and fail and learn and grow throughout the high school, today, I wrote about Hasebrook's class because I think her lesson captures perfectly why intelligent failure it is such an important ideal to pursue.