I'm an educator in the Veterinary Nursing Program at Michigan State University. Students graduating from our undergraduate program become working veterinary nurses. Similar to human nurses, veterinary nurses provide most of a patient's nursing care and must be efficient and skilled in MANY technical skills. These skills take practice, patience, and FAILURE.
As an educator, it's become apparent that my students do not accept failure well. In fact, most seem to despise it and don't recognize the learning opportunities that often come with it. However, this topic of student failure and educational success is not an easy subject to navigate, giving rise to this topic's name of a "wicked question."
To gain further knowledge and understanding, of student failure and its recognition, I created a professional survey. Program educators completed the survey, and the results have been interpreted. I was also able to find some educational research that related to my wicked problem. The results of the survey and research can be found in the Adobe Spark presentation.
Richard Barth states, "Learning from failure leads to humility, adaptation, and resiliency; unfortunately, most students are taught to fear failure from a young age. To combat this trend, educators can emphasize having a growth mindset, encourage learning from past failures, and ask students to reflect regularly on, rather than ruminate over, failures" (Barth et al., 2019). In accordance, I created a failure reflection document. Students will receive this several times during their veterinary nursing skills course. I felt this was an appropriate place to emphasize the importance of failure, as this course is packed with technical skills and hands-on practice using models and live animals. For many students, this will be their first time performing a skill (such as drawing blood from a patient's vessel) and many will face moments of frustration. This document will help students recognize the learning opportunities that arise from moments of failure.
References:
Barth, R. et al. (2019). Facing Failure and Breeding Success. The New York Times inEDUCATION. Retrieved from https://nytimesineducation.com/spotlight/facing-failure-and-breeding-success/.
Exploring the Depth of Self Reflection by tuyddatygl is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0