Failfest

Real education (including assessment) always involves a risk (Biesta, G., 2014). Fear of failure stifles creativity and innovation and it's difficult to teach our students that failure is ok (perhaps inevitable) if we continually show them that it isn't. In the final Assessment Design Community event for 2023, Dr Angie Knaggs of the School of Languages and Cultures and Dr Luke Zaphir from ITaLI’s Digital Assessment Team take a celebratory look at the importance of embracing failure in academic settings.

As professionals and practitioners, we often treat failure as something that is blameworthy – something to be hidden or endured. Yet, as educators, we know that failure can be an essential component of the learning experience, and even praiseworthy (Edmondson A, 2023).

Failure might make us uncomfortable or awkward, but we can learn from the ideas that didn’t work in the way we intended, the perspectives we didn’t consider, the unusual circumstances we weren’t prepared for, or simply the complexity of what we attempted. To that end, we have awards for our failures and we need audience participation for these! Bring your stories of assessments gone awry, failed initiatives, or methodological mishaps. Perhaps a criteria sheet or rubric that led to a cohort meltdown, or an innovative use of technology that didn’t quite work as planned - bring it along and celebrate it! Through group discussions and reflections, we'll collaboratively discover how sharing these so-called 'failures' can build a culture of creative risk taking in educational design (Hook J, et al 2022) and guide us towards higher-quality assessments.