Thomas Edison famously failed to make a lightbulb 1000 times before he was successful. James Dyson made 5,126 prototypes of his bagless vacuum cleaner before the one that worked. Harry Potter author Joanne Rowling was rejected by twelve publishers before her manuscript was accepted. The lessons from this for students in higher education are clear; to engage effectively with the learning processes in higher education, take responsibility for their academic attainment, and become the innovators of the future, students need the underpinning ‘grit’ and resilience to actively engage with the ‘failures’ they will inevitably experience during their studies.
This workshop provides a theoretical framework (Carol Dweck’s Mindset theory [Dweck, 2006]) and practical activities to enable you to encourage and develop your students’ effort, tenacity, and ‘confidence in failure’; and to develop a culture of learning resilience in an environment where the stakes are high and costly, and the student goal is the academic outcome, not the learning process itself.
In this workshop you will explore ways to support your students to develop more 'Growth-Mindset' approaches such as determination and robustness, through the use of 'planned points of failure' which are supported by the use of formative assessment and effective feedback practices.
Please bring with you, or be able to access, assessment materials for ONE module or course you teach on, as you will be working with these in the session (e.g. learning outcomes, summative tasks, grading matrices or criteria, formative assessment opportunities).
By the end of this workshop you should be able to:
