“If you are not prepared to be wrong

you’ll never come up with anything original.”

                                                                               Sir Ken Robinson

I’m preparing a webinar for OUP on digital assessment and one of the ideas that I plan to address is the importance of failure in learning.

Our students should always feel that they are in a safe environment where they can take risks and make mistakes and we should help them embrace failure as a valuable learning experience. To fail  is, in fact, inevitable at one point or another. When failure is followed by constructive feedback that addresses both the strengths and the weaknesses of the learners, it provides a new opportunity to learn from it. Reflecting on what they did, how they did it and why, with the guidance of the teacher helps students to find new paths and alternatives and promotes learning. And isn’t that assessment’s primary purpose too?

Finland celebrates the International Day for Failure on October, 13. The idea is to celebrate our shortcomings and to spread the understanding that failing is part of the learning experience. I think schools all over the world should definitely join the celebration!

On a personal note, when I first accepted the challenge of participating in the OUP seminars I was excited and grateful but it felt like a big responsibility and I had to accept there was a possibility of failure. I’ve felt this way many times in my professional career. In fact, it is this possibility that makes my job all the more exciting. It means I get to do new things, to face new challenges and, most of all, I get to LEARN from these experiences, whether they are successful or not.