Fear of Failure: Supporting Students Who Won't Start (or Never Finish)

We are thinking today about supporting students who fear getting things wrong. Um, so first of all, just lovely if some of you would just say hello. Pop who you are in the chat, who you are, where you are, what's your role, um, and the type of place that you're at. This just helps to give us a bit of an idea about who's turning up to these sessions and how we can better tailor them moving forwards. And do feel free just throughout to pop whatever you want to in the chat. There will be proper time for Q&A at the end, but we're really keen to kind of develop this very much as a kind of network, supportive, safe space where we're exploring the things that matter to you and you've got a space to share out as well. So, do pop a hello in the chat. We'll get prizes for the people who have come the furthest. So, I'm currently in Polegate, which is East Sussex, and uh Ian's down in Dorset. Um so, we're thinking about those students who struggle um to, you know, because of their fear of failure. Um, and we kind of looking here broadly at two different groups of students. Um, we've got the perfectionist. So, the one who uh wants to get everything perfect and nine out of 10 isn't good enough and sometimes they will be drafting and reddrafting and reddrafting and reddrafting their work. Uh, Lyra, who many of you will have met who has MCED these sessions in the past, my daughter, she is that child. Um, and sometimes she, you know, finds it difficult to start for fear of not getting it quite right. Um, and then we also have the student who doesn't start at all. The disengaged student who perhaps is uh thinking that it's safer not to try at all than to try and to maybe get it wrong. Um, or the student who's so paralyzed by the fear of failure um that they just can't get started at all. So, these two quite different students, one who maybe looks like they don't care and the other one who's just endlessly reddrafting and for whom nothing is ever quite at the standard that they hope it to be. Um, and the thing that these have both got in common and will be able to hopefully meet both of their needs somewhat with the different strategies we're going to talk about today is that they both need the stakes to be lowered. we need to create um safety, psychological, cognitive safety for these students so that they feel prepared to try. This is what we're trying to get to today. So, we're going to look at seven different ways of trying to achieve that. The ideas I'm going to share, I think, I hope um are applicable across a whole range of different ages and stages. But, of course, as always, take the ideas that you think will work for you, um adapt them, use them, share them, and the ones that don't feel so good, that's fine. Leave them for someone else. Okay. Okay. So, the first idea is the not finished, just due rule. Um, and the idea with this is that we're not looking for our students to return to us their finished work. We're just saying time's up. It's time to hand it in. Um, because finished for some students is going to imply perfection. It's going to suggest we got to that beautiful golden end point. Whereas due just suggests we've had our allotted time, we're done here now. We are moving on. Um, this can really really matter for some students um because they will just endlessly continue where you've got students like Lyra who will reddraft and reddraft and reddraft in pursuit of perfection. It's really helpful actually to um give some of this kind of leeway to parents as well and make a suggestion about how long homework could and should be taking here as well. and making it really clear to the student that this is not about the final piece, but it's about the process. So, we're generally, not always, but we're generally looking to develop our learning, our knowledge, our skills through the process of the tasks that we're doing rather than it all being about that final completed uh kind of project if you like. Um, so yes, having a set allocation of time and suggesting that we're done here. So, what we'll do here is we're going to change our language and the way that we're acting around the finishing of work a little bit. So, rather than is it finished, using language like that's due, um finished implies we're at the end. It's perfect. Whereas, um now we're just saying we're done for now, we're handing it in. Hand in your finished work, but rather I'm collecting what you've got so far and you should have finished by now versus we'll come back to this. So students knowing perhaps that something is a work in progress can be really helpful. So this is going to be about really uh clearly defining what our objectives are for the uh allocated time that we're working on the task. Making it clear perfection finishing isn't necessarily the goal and that when time's up we are just going to hand in or put away where we've got to so far and that that is okay. This can be especially helpful for some students who find it very difficult to get through the tasks as well. Um because it may be for example that our ADHD learner might have learned a huge amount from the three questions that they've done. Um but there might have been 10 in total but we want to celebrate the progress and the learning that has happened rather than them feeling um that they failed because they didn't get through all 10. So we are looking for due rather than done. Number two is think aloud your rough working. So this is thinking about you as a role model for learning. So what happens sometimes is that you are kind of on this pedestal. You're perfect, right? You've got this all sorted all the time and your learners um will see you as this kind of beacon of brilliance. I know you might not feel like that right now. I I'm not sure if any of us do at 10 4 in the afternoon as it's getting dark in January, but honestly, your learners see you as this font of all knowledge. And what they need to know is that you struggle sometimes, too. That there is a process behind how you get through your learning. Um, and so you need to show your working just like we do in maths. We're going to show the working. We're going to think out loud. Um, when students only see the the finished work, whether that's from you or from fellow students, they sort of assume that no one else struggled during the process. So any struggles that they might have, maybe they're a student that struggles with their executive functioning, maybe the organizing and planning is difficult, or maybe they're a student for whom motor skills are a little bit more tricky and that the the fine motor skills of writing uh might be difficult. maybe they find it hard to marshall their ideas and this has been a real challenge for them. Um and and and so all these different things we're experiencing in ourselves, but when we just see everyone else's completed work or the teacher's perfect example, we just assume everyone else can just do it. And that can be really really dispiriting and make us feel like we're lacking somehow. So you can role model this. You can narrate your hesitation out loud. In particular, show your mistakes. actually let students know when you get it wrong. Um, particularly when we're newer and we feel like we should know all the answers. Um, then we can rush to perfect any mistakes that we make to protect ourselves from having been seen to get it wrong. You know, you write the wrong date on the board. We're quickly quickly changing it. But actually, what's more helpful for our students sometimes is for us to go very very, you know, kind of um performatively, oh dear, I've put the wrong date. Silly me. uh and then actually be seen to be correcting it. For example, um we might do things like if we're spelling a particularly challenging word, diarrhea, perhaps we're writing the word d diarrhea on the board for some reason. Um and um we might actually think out loud about how to spell that or think about how we're going to check depart in a rush running hard or else accident just in case you want a way to never forget. By the way, [laughter] um that was something that was come up within a year 7 class I was in and I still can remember Mrs. Helon writing it on the board very purposefully and saying out loud depart in a rush running hard or else accident. But you see I remember that moment and I remember thinking Mrs. Helicon finds it quite hard to spell that word. That is quite a hard word and that's okay. And that's sort of what we're looking for here because it may not surprise you that I was a little bit of a perfectionist and knowing that my teachers were fallible was kind of helpful. Um, and let them see you change your mind. So perhaps you're in some sort of uh planning exploring stage of a task. Um, and and you know you're going to change how how that goes. So think out loud, brainstorm with them. let them know that you don't just get there boom boom boom but rather there are different meanders and research along the way. So role model it get stuff wrong sometimes you can also do this across other other spheres. So one of the great ways that you can role model being a fallible learner to your students is to have fun with them when you get the opportunity through your extracurriculars. So join in the school trips fall off the climbing wall miss the frisbee when it's thrown to you. Just go and do the things that you feel uncomfortably a little bit bad at and relish the joy, the laughter, the connection that comes with that when your students who find things a struggle and yet are expected to do them every day see that you're human, too. I took a long time to learn this, by the way. I was definitely a I'm not going near a frisbee because I know I won't catch it kind of person. It took me a very long time to get brave enough to be bad at throwing a frisbee in front of children. But do you know what? The rewards really are worth it and it makes everybody then want to join in instead of sitting on the side like I did for many years. Still can't catch a frisbee mind. Okay. Number three, celebrate the edit, not the first draft. So, what we're doing here is thinking about what we've improved between attempts rather than what is perfect. So we're we're celebrating that process of editing, of learning, of making things better as we go. Um so rather than just saying, you know, what we've done is good, um we are thinking about how we can be improving and acknowledging that we're all learners, we're all editing, we're all uh making progress all the time. Um, so rather than just pointing out what's good, what's right, we're going to be thinking about what can be improved in all our work and try to encourage ourselves to be these kind of um, yes, improving, progressing learners. The word edits giving me a bit of a twitch right now because I've just put in yet another round of edits on a a book I'm working on on uh, oh my god, what's the book I've been working on? Neurode divergence in the classroom. There we go. Neurodyivergence in the classroom. Literally, I've written tens of thousands of words on this and it's just just gone. Anyway, editing, it's a really important part of the process. Um, it is a challenging one where we acknowledge that we've not got things perfectly. Um, but this is a a very good thing for our students to see to learn is how we improve. So, instead of just saying, you know, this is right or good work, we're going to be looking for those signs of improvement, the editor. So, you've developed this since your first go or I can see that you've added more detail here. celebrate the changes that they're making, the progress that's happening, the edits that are happening, and instead of some excellent pieces of work. I want to celebrate some brilliant editing. The other nice thing about this, of course, is this will enable you to celebrate different learners and different types of learners in your class because you might have some learners in your class who are actually just generally quite um proficient and will produce a pretty good first draft and their work might get celebrated quite often. But what about that learner who finds it really really hard but actually made tremendous progress between draft one and draft two? They might still not be reading reaching the giddy heights of what your you know very able student over there did. But if we're seeing great progress here, this to my mind is worth celebrating far more than a really good first attempt from another student, particularly if that other student is regularly celebrated. So let's really praise the effort here. And again, this goes across all domains. I'm thinking about this right now from the point of view of classwork. But this equally might be a student who's kind of fumbling through a a social interaction and trying really hard because they've told you that they want to make friends with this other kid in dinosaur club or what have you and you see them trying and you see them trying again and different questions and you might notice that and celebrate it with them. Okay, number four is the first minute grace. Now this is because the blank page. Any of us who've ever tried to write um or per perhaps other creative endeavors as well know how very challenging the blank page can be and it can be the same for our students as well. That blank page can be absolutely horrifying. One of the things I often say to kids is just write absolutely anything or just scribble something on it or start in the middle of the book just so there's something in there. just getting rid of the blank page is is important and helpful to some students just breaking uh that fear. Um but what we're thinking here is instead of it needing to be perfect that we're going to have just a little window where instead of going right on and into doing a great job, we're just going to start. All that we need to do is to start. Um it doesn't matter how good, how bad, how indifferent it is. Some students will find that having a specific process to go through here will help them that they're always writing their name, their date, the title from the board or something like that just to kind of ease them into the task because for some of them particularly our neurode divergent learners task initiation getting started is a really big problem. But for some students, our PDA students, the demand avoidant ones, being told that they must write their name, the date, and the title from the board might be enough to make them completely unable to start the task. So, we've got to balance the needs of these different learners. Um, but try and enable everyone just to make a start. So, we might do something like setting a visible timer, making sure that for the first minute we've not we're not kind of overlooking anyone's shoulders. We're just removing ourselves as an audience and just giving people space to take a breath and start in the way that feels comfortable for them. So the first minute we've got no expectations. All we're doing is just making a gentle start in the way that feels okay for us. This is a helpful um sort of idea where so we need to help individual students understand for themselves what helps them with task initiation so they can use this minute in the way that works for them. So our PDAs aren't going to want to you know title date whatever they're going to be need to have choices about how they start other students will want that routine that rigidity of doing it a particular way. This is a really helpful thing to get into the habit of before things like exams because really commonly we'll get that anxiety of the blank page and we're fearful that we're not going to perform to our highest standard in this moment and suddenly it's all gone out the window. And so actually just knowing how to start what we'll do first. And it can be something really silly like doodling a particular thing and just having a little routine or ritual that you always doodle the snail and your name or whatever might be how you first put pen to paper and from there we move on. I always start with a little to-do list. It's just how I roll. Little boxes I can tick off. Uh number five is talk before you write. Um, so for some students talking is much easier than writing. For some it's the other way round in those moments of mutism. But right now we're thinking about the fact that writing is a high demand task for many students. It involves uh needing to marshall our thoughts, lots of executive function there. It involves remembering what it is we're thinking, what the task was and getting that to paper. It involves lots of fine motor skills and so on and so forth. So writing is quite a high challenge, high load task. And so sometimes we might prefer to to speak instead. The other nice thing about speaking is that it's not recorded. So you can have all of your silly ideas here. We can brainstorm. We can explore. Nobody's expecting anything of us. We can do this in that first minute too perhaps as well when there are no expectations. So it's very very temporary. So what we can do here is just for the first 60 or 90 seconds of any written task actually build in a before pens time. Um, so we're going to reduce that load. We're maybe just going to talk um with a partner. Some students might prefer to do it internally, talk to themselves. That's okay. But allowing that little bit of rehearsal time and then they have got something they can write straight away because whatever it is they've just been talking about, they can just write it down and that's their start. What we want to try and get over here with a lot of these students is this idea that what we write has to be perfect. What we want to do is actually just make a start. And this is something again like in my own work. So, I write a lot. Um, and I have learned over time that the fear of uh there's a phrase that Ian will remember later, I'm sure, but it's something about the the perfect being the enemy of the good or the good of something like perfect is the enemy of the good. Is that right, Ian? It's something like that. Um, and so, and so it's very difficult to get started. So, when I'm writing, I just write and I don't edit at all. And I started doing this during a thing called Nano Remo, which is National Novel Writing Month, where you look to try in the month of November to write an entire novelish worth of words. I think it's like 50,000 words that you write in the month. And the process that most people use for doing this is just to not edit at all. You just write and you write and you write and you write and you write. And then December is the month of editing. Um, and this really taught me a lot about the importance of just getting the words out there. The editing comes later. And and we can teach our students this same process that just getting started, getting our ideas out of the thing. It doesn't matter if they're messy at first. It doesn't matter if it's not in full sentences. This is the bit where we're just getting started, getting those ideas together. But yes, so that 60 or 90 seconds, we're going to perhaps work with a partner or in a small group, have a little chat about it. really low stakes, maybe talk to your TA or your teacher and then we might start to write something down. Number six of seven is having some success criteria before the pencil touches the paper. So your students, if they are going not to fail, need to know what success looks like. If we don't set decent criteria for them, then you're going to find you've got a couple of different types of students in your classes. Some will make a pretty good stab at it based on what you've said in the past. But your natural perfectionists are going to aim really, really high. They're going to assume that you're going to expect, you know, the most amazing piece of work that's ever been created in the history of the world with no mistakes and got right first time. Whereas your disengaged students, if they're not told, this is what we need to create in the next 20 minutes, will maybe just not do anything at all. So, what we want to do is say, "The bar is here. This is what a good one looks like." like and in fact not a good one but a good enough one looks like. Good enough is really important here when we're thinking about our students who are fearful of failure, our students who are perfectionist. What does good enough actually look like here? What are we looking for? So here when we're thinking about what good enough looks like, we can also help our students to focus on what it is we're doing. Why are we doing this task? Because some of them, the perfectionists in particular, are going to be focused on the output. They're going to be focused on the neatness of their writing or the clarity of what they've said or how many of their maths problems they've done or whatever it might be, the beauty of the artwork they've created. But actually, we're not here, as we talked about before, for those outputs. We're here for the process. That's where the learning and the magic generally happens. So, we can think with our students, why are we doing this task? what are we actually learning here? Um, we can think with them as they were on their way through it like what's clearer now than when I started and also learn from the task. What would I do differently next time? So again, these kinds of questions can help the student and us to focus in the process of learning rather than being so wedded always to the output which is where the fear comes for some of these students. And then finally, having private practice windows because for some students, it's almost like stage fright, right? So that idea that we're having to answer in front of everyone or we're writing something down that everybody's going to read. So sometimes we just need to give our students space to do this on their own, to do their own little journey. Um and it's you know going to be different for different students with different tasks but essentially if there's no one watching listening reading regarding then that performance anxiety will often largely uh disappear. I just have images here of um Hugh Grant doing his dance in love actually here going down the stairs and suddenly his uh member of staff is behind him and he just stops. He was having a gay old time until that moment arose when he realized he was watched having uh you know really really giving it everything in his singing and his dancing and we want our students to have the space to do that to give it a really good crack without anyone breathing down their neck. So here we can build in a few minutes just to try a few things. So mini whiteboards my girls loved these when we were um home educating learning from home. uh you can rub things out as much as you want and they go away afterwards, whether that's drawing, writing, maths, whatever it might be. So, your mini whiteboards, that kind of thing can be super helpful here. Lyra also really liked typing rather than writing for the same reason. She said that she felt far less pressure once she was allowed to use a laptop in class because she could delete. Um so, it really took the pressure off for her. Scrap paper. Um just, you know, being able to uh have extra paper or a draft notebook. um some people will use sometimes uh which isn't going to be marked, isn't going to be handed in unless they particularly want to see it. Um and then like in their book or on their piece of paper, you can always just draw a line and just say everything above that is private practice. I'm not going to look at it. That's just for you. Um so it's just uh their own private work. Okay, so that was whistle stop. That was our seven uh wins. I would love you to just put in the comments any uh ideas, feedback, thoughts, how you might use these, how you might adapt them for your different settings, anything you would add to them. Um while I very very briefly uh recap. So first of all, the not finished just due rule. This is where we're going to move from done finished to we're done for now. So we're going to hand in what we've got so far or we're just going to move on rather than looking for the perfect end point. Think aloud your rough working. This is you acting as a learning role model, not always getting things right and sometimes celebrating those moments when you get them wrong. Showing students what your process is for learning so they can uh learn from that. Uh we're going to celebrate the edit, not the first or final draft. Um we're going to think about what we're learning as we go through. Celebrate the actual process of editing. We're going to give a first minute grace where there's no expectations where we're just going to get let students get get started in the way that feels most appropriate for them. We're going to give students sometimes the chance to talk before they write because writing is a high demand task. Talking for many students much of the time is a lower demand task and the conversation they've had may give them something they can then start their writing with. We're going to agree the success criteria before pencils touch paper so that every student knows what good enough looks like in this particular task. So they know where to pitch what they're doing. And we are going to think about providing private practice windows because stage fright disappears when there is no audience.