JANUARY 18, 2024
From: Beckie Supiano
Subject: Teaching: How to help students learn from setbacks
Struggle and failure can be powerful learning experiences; but because they’re unpleasant, students who experience them may instead disengage. How can instructors support students through challenges and setbacks so that they’re better able to learn and less likely to give up?
I recently spoke with Eliana Crosina, lead co-author of a new paper presenting the results of a longitudinal study of students in a yearlong, experiential entrepreneurship course — a setting where the need to make sense of setbacks is especially acute.
The paper, published in Academy of Management Learning and Education, examines “critical incidents” — problems with projects or challenges with teammates that spark a negative emotion — students faced and how students’ engagement with elements of the course helped them process those feelings and keep going.
While the entrepreneurship course her team studied differs from a conventional college course, Crosina, an assistant professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College, shared some insights that could apply to instructors in other settings.
Professors can normalize struggle: Academic settings can condition students to focus on performance, chasing a good grade. But the entrepreneurship course was structured to emphasize process. It’s not unique in that regard — similar models exist in other project-based courses, including writing courses, and there are grading systems designed to encourage this mindset, too.
In the entrepreneurship course, Crosina said, professors “help students process the struggle, giving them language to express it.” That reminded me, I told her, of efforts by some STEM instructors to convey that failure comes with the territory of scientific work, sometimes by giving examples of times when they encountered setbacks themselves.
If students are likely to face challenges, priming them to expect that, and to know that it can lead to learning, can help set them up to persist.
Professors can coach: The entrepreneurship course has a coaching model, allowing professors to give more personalized feedback outside of class. The researchers write that instructors may want to find ways to provide students with more tailored support, “specifically around points where tension and anxiety may be heightened,” adding that “doing so requires educators to be less bound to the classroom as the sole teaching space.” In a conventional course, that might take place during office hours.
Professors can acknowledge small wins: Students’ entrepreneurial ventures didn’t always work, but professors still encouraged students to acknowledge “small wins” like working well with their teammates or breaking even despite not turning a profit. Keeping those small wins in mind helps students persist. That reminded me of the way many instructors attend to students’ progress and provide feedback about what students are doing well, not only what they got wrong.
Professors can turn to their colleagues: The professors teaching the entrepreneurship course have created a community where they can get ideas and advice from one another, Crosina noted. Such support is critical, especially when instructors aim to teach in an open and emotionally engaged way.
