Giving Compass' Take:

• Grace Magley explains how she came to appreciate the value of sharing and learning from the educational innovation that she and others have undertaken. 

• How can failures be destigmatized to improve sharing and learning? 

• Learn more about failures in education philanthropy. 

The most surprising thing I have learned from innovation networks is that sharing our individual failures and talking about what we do after failure is part of the journey we are all on as leaders transforming education systems. I understand now that transformation is not working on initiative after initiative, but a strategic, long-term process of bringing people along and iterating on ideas and models until they work for the community and become part of the culture.

This idea of sharing failures, however, was something that I personally was not comfortable with in the beginning. I just never did that in my district or with my colleagues. Mostly, we talked about our successes and what worked for us. It was surprising to me that during network convenings, we were frequently asked to talk about failure. In fact, TLA’s IDN has deliberate time set aside for members to tell their “story of learning” as a way for us to get to know each other, and often, the stories are of failure and the iteration that follows. At first, I did not understand why we would want to spend time sharing our failures. I don’t believe many school leaders are comfortable talking about failure – at least that has been my experience in Massachusetts. But what I found is that when we discuss our failures to our “tribe” of like-minded educators, it can be empowering and can lead to new ideas and solutions.

Read the full article about learning from failures by Grace Magley at The Learning Accelerator.