Professional Development Overview

Failure plays an important role in increasing youth’s persistence, motivation, self-efficacy, and agency within fields that encourage innovation and creativity. These professional development modules will guide you to create a culture of reflection for educator professional growth in supporting failure moments during STEAM-making activities, including workshops, drop-in sessions, and camps.

Goals for this PD

  1. Build a community of educators
  2. Reflect on failure moments as adults
  3. Discuss personal/professional associations with failure
  4. Develop empathy for the learner’s experiences with failure, and how this might be similar to and/or different from an adult’s experience
  5. Engage in a FiM making activity as a learner and consider times youth may experience failure
  6. Discuss pedagogical moves to productively address youths’ failures before, during and after they occur
  7. Record facilitation moments
  8. Reflect on facilitation and failure moments

There are two main sections to this professional development sequence: Setting Context and Recording and Reflecting on Failure. We recommend doing these activities with a group. Modify the sequence or activities to fit the goals and needs at your organization. We offer some guidance in the Plan Your Own section below and additional materials and activities in the Resources section.

Setting Context

In Setting Context you (a) begin to build a community of educators, (b) reflect on failure moments as adults, and (c) discuss personal/professional associations with failure. Our partners typically integrated these activities into trainings with all educators at their site, regardless if they were a part of the FiM project or not.

  • Building Community
  • Experiencing Failure
  • Defining Failure
  • Youth Failure
  • Pedagogical Failure Moves
  • Plan for Failures

Go to Setting Context activities

Recording and Reflecting on Failure

Recording and reflecting on failure should be an iterative sequence where you (a) record your own facilitation practice and (b) reflect upon it. Then repeat (a) and (b) to iteratively improve your practice.

Preliminary Work for Recording & Reflecting

  • Goal Setting
  • Visitor Feedback
  • Consent / Privacy

Record a Failure Facilitation

  • Capturing Facilitation Practice
  • Recording with Video
  • Video Selection

Reflect & Improve

  • Culture of Respect
  • Culture of Noticing and Feedback
  • Iterate and Improve

Go to Recording and Reflecting activities

Plan your own Professional Development

For each section above, think about HOW you’ll achieve the goals 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!  

Considerations for facilitating these activities with a group of educators:

  • 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

Go to Planning resources (including example agendas)