Harnessing Failure for Innovation: Improving Feedback in Professional Development

What is it about?

This research article explores how learning from failure can lead to new and creative ways to teach teachers. We looked at a the design of a professional development approach called StoryCircles, where teachers work together on a lesson in order to improve their teaching. We focused on the problems we faced when trying to give teachers feedback on their teaching methods. Even when things didn't go as planned, our attempts to iteratively refine the professional development approach helped us come up with new ideas for giving feedback to teachers. We found that the feedback teachers get just by looking at the materials teachers used, both before and after they taught a lesson is powerful, but sometimes it wasn't enough to help them get better at specific parts of their practice they need to address. In this article, we share examples of three challenges we faced in our design of feedback for teachers.

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Photo by Headway on Unsplash

Photo by Headway on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This article makes two valuable contributions to the literature. Firstly, it emphasizes the importance of embracing creative risk and learning from failure for instructional designers to drive innovation. The article encourages instructional designers to see challenges and failures as opportunities for innovation while providing insights into what failure-based learning can entail. It stresses the need for patience and incremental changes rather than quickly abandoning principled decisions. Secondly, it adds to the body of knowledge about innovative approaches for teacher learning through collaborative lesson planning. This work introduces a system of professional development capable of capturing teachers' practical knowledge in an accessible and adaptable format. This approach aims to transform professional development into a more collaborative and collective process, challenging the traditional role of facilitators. By sharing these experiences and insights, our hope is that other professional development program designers can gain a deeper understanding of how lesson visualization, artifacts, and contingencies can foster teachers' learning within a collaborative context.