Plan a Professional Development Sequence

These resources will help you design a professional development (PD) for educators at your institution in order to support youth failure moments that occur during STEAM making activities. First, Set Context by discussing, defining, and experiencing failure, and second, Record and Reflect on facilitation of failure moments.

Your Failure-in-Making (FiM) PD should include:

  1. Building a community of vulnerability and trust
  2. Experiencing Failure
    • Engaging in a FiM making activity as learners and consider times youth may experience failure
    • Developing empathy for the learner’s experiences with failure, and how this might be similar to and/or different from an adult’s experience
  3. Defining failure
    • Reflecting on personal failure moments
    • Discussing personal/professional associations with failure
  4. Considering Youth Failure
    • Discussing pedagogical moves to productively address youths’ failures before, during and after they occur
    • Collecting data from youth about failure
  5. Recording Practice 
    • Developing a set of practices and norms for video recording and reflection
    • Video recording educator facilitation of a failure activity
  6. Reflecting 
    • Reflecting on recording and next steps for continuing to develop ideas

For all of these, think about HOW you’ll achieve this goal or WHAT activities you’ll do. You can integrate this into your current PD or develop a new series of PD workshops, whatever works for you!  

Additional considerations:

  • Who is participating in this professional development?
  • Are you already a team?  How long have people been working together?
  • What is their/your comfort level with
    • visitor failure
    • own facilitation failures
    • recording >> are educators ready to record their practice?
  • What activity / where will you see failure?
  • How much time do you have / want to devote to this project?
  • This PD is most impactful when you engage in an iterative cycle of reflection

Record and Reflect

Facilitating Discussions

You must be willing to participate and be vulnerable. It has been suggested from our partnering sites that you as a facilitator start this process with a video clip of yourself engaging with youth in a STEAM-focused making activity. 

How will you introduce norms? How will you incorporate educator and/or team goals? How will educators introduce their video clip (e.g. provide context or other background)? 

From our experience, educators tend to focus on positive aspects of how their colleagues respond to youth’s moments of failure. How might you support educators in providing constructive and not evaluative feedback to one another?

Keep in mind (a) the “fear” and focus that many will have on their own practices and (b) tensions between ideal learning experiences and pragmatic realities. Acknowledge but try to reframe to focus on learners.

How would you redirect a conversation focused on student misbehavior? How would you navigate a conversation that positions the educator as a “failure”? How would you build upon a conversation that is focused on how the educator’s response to the child’s failure shaped the child’s project? What might you do if a video shared is void of youth’s failure moments?

Will you gather student data within your STEAM-making activities and utilize them in these reflection sessions? How might you introduce student data as a form of feedback? What questions might you ask to support educator’s reflection on their pedagogical practices through student data?

How will you end your reflection sessions? We suggest providing time to reflect on the session (e.g., feedback given and received) and individual and/or team pedagogical practices around youth’s experiences with failure. This could be quiet time and/or a discussion.