The Power of Struggle

A black plastic bin sits next to the 3D printer in Exeter’s Design Lab, the collaborative markerspace in the third-floor physics wing of Phelps Science Center. Labeled “Scrap PLA Only,” the bin contains a jumbled heap of distorted pieces of polylactic acid (PLA), the biodegradable plastic known for its low melting point that is typically used for 3D printing.

Some of the pieces are stamped with perfect round holes; others are so thin and twisted, they resemble spaghetti. Instructor in Computer Science Sean Campbell, who directs the Design Lab, jokingly calls this bin the “bucket of failure”: a physical symbol of the students’ trial-and-error and problem-solving process to turn their digital models into 3D-printed reality.

In Campbell’s fall-term integrated studies course, INT455: Principles of Engineering and Design, students take full advantage of the hands-on, project-oriented environment of the Design Lab. “The course is all about the process of design: Test, make your adjustment, try again,” Campbell explains. “It’s incremental improvement after incremental failing, I guess you could say.”

Aside from the engineering course, and the spring-term course INT554: Design Thinking, most of what students do in the Design Lab is not for a class but for their own independent work, or projects for an activity like the Robotics Club. The lab is intended to be a safe space for making mistakes, with positive results for student resilience.

“The stakes are lower,” Campbell says. “Failure is not as consequential, and there’s not this effect on their future. The hope is that feeling spills over into what they’re doing in class. That sensation of, OK, I messed up, but I can do it a little bit better next time.”

Campbell tries to foster that mindset in his computer science classes, where making mistakes is similarly part of the learning process. Students need time to adjust to this concept, especially those who may be new to Exeter and reluctant to show vulnerabilities in the classroom.

“Students will fret over their code,” Campbell says. “But I say: ‘Just write it and try it. The machine’s going to tell you if it’s right or wrong.’ … It’s really just the backspace key and try again.”

Across departments, Exeter’s instructors strive to create an environment in which students can be unafraid to make the kind of “intelligent failures” Edmondson describes. The process of testing hypotheses in a science laboratory is one of the most clear-cut examples, but failure is also essential to learning in Exeter’s distinctive math pedagogy, which relies on an ever-evolving set of problems that are designed to be open-ended, with multiple possible approaches and answers.

Math Department Chair Panama Geer says the goal of each problem is not just getting a final answer, but the process of problem-solving and learning from mistakes. “One of the things that we value in the math classroom is risk-taking and daring to be wrong,” she says. “The process of getting to an answer is really where the thinking happens.”

The 3,700-plus problems in Exeter’s core curriculum, popularly referred to as Exeter Math, focus on recurring strands — among them optimization, symmetry, graphing, vectors and parameterization, and modeling — that build on themselves as students’ understanding grows. They are updated each year by Exeter math faculty, incorporating insights from the students and teachers who use them.

Geer stresses that for these problems, there’s not one right way to achieve a correct answer, and sometimes more learning happens when an answer is incorrect. “I’ve just said it today to a student in my first class, ‘This is incorrect, but it’s great,’” she says. “‘So let’s talk about why it’s great and what you learned.’”

This kind of thinking is freeing for students, Geer says, because it takes some pressure off and creates an open-ended, safe space where students learn it’s OK to admit they’re struggling. This can be an adjustment for a lot of new students, she acknowledges, particularly those who are used to doing well in their math classes without much extra effort.

“Our students put a lot of pressure on themselves academically, and we’re asking them to stand up in front of an audience of peers and be vulnerable and make mistakes,” Geer says. “The sooner we get them accustomed to that, the more productive they are.”

Geer keeps an eye out for any students who seem to be holding back in her classroom, perhaps for fear of being wrong. “I’ll just try and read their faces and say: ‘I feel like you have an idea here that you’re not sharing. What are you thinking?’” she says. “They might say: ‘Oh, well Problem 6 reminds me of Problem 25. Does that ring a bell for anybody else?’ Then suddenly people will jump on that, and those are beautiful moments in the classroom.”

For Geer, the process of solving Exeter’s math problems through trial and error, throwing out ideas and having peers both question and support you, is just one form of the natural way that we as humans learn.

“You wouldn’t think being wrong is something that would give kids confidence, but it does,” Geer adds. “We’re creating a safe space to be wrong, where kids are encouraged to take risks. By taking those risks, that’s where one dusts off the corners between understanding and lack of understanding.”

Paul Muentener ’00 recalls the four years he spent at Exeter as a time when he was surrounded by people who shared his love of learning and intellectual engagement. “What I enjoyed most about Exeter was learning from my peers around the table, and getting perspectives that I didn’t have myself,” Muentener says.

To do this, he had to embrace a willingness to be wrong, at least some of the time. Now an associate professor of psychology at Tufts University, Muentener sees his time at the Harkness table as an important stage in developing metacognition, or the awareness of his own thoughts and learning processes. “It’s basically the knowledge of what we do and don’t know,” he explains.

In addition to teaching psychology, Muentener is director of the Cognitive Development Laboratory at Tufts, where he studies the foundations of how children learn to explore, talk and think about the world around them. While his research focuses on cognitive development in the preschool to early elementary phase, he stresses that the ideas and concepts he’s studying are applicable to most stages of development, and likely to adults as well.

Through his research, Muentener has come to see failure as a unique opportunity for learning. “It triggers you to focus on what you don’t know, on what’s not going right, on what you could learn more about,” he says. “In some ways people view failure negatively, but I think it’s one of the times that it really puts you in a space to learn more.”

To explain the learning potential of these moments of failure, Muentener often gives his students the example of what happens when a TV remote control, a cellphone or another everyday piece of technology fails. “You don’t have to think about how your systems and tools work when they work as expected,” he says, “but when things don’t work, it invites you to ask yourself why. Are the batteries dead in the remote control? Did I point it in the wrong direction? Those are the types of experiences that prompt that type of question-asking.”

Muentener also sees failure as important relative to developing what Stanford University professor Carol Dweck has called a “growth mindset”: the belief that you can build on your abilities through effort, good instruction and persistence, and that failing and trying again are a key part of that process. By contrast, those with a “fixed mindset” tend to see setbacks as reflecting their inherent lack of ability. Because of this, they may tend to avoid taking risks and putting themselves in situations where such setbacks are a possibility, depriving them of key learning and development opportunities.

“If you never face a challenge, and you never fail, you aren’t given the evidence you need to think that you can grow and change,” Muentener says, adding that failure “promotes the idea that you can push yourself to gain new knowledge or new skills.”

For Muentener, Exeter’s focus on ensuring that students with different perspectives and opinions are listening to and learning from each other — even when they disagree — is part of what enables them to weather the inevitable challenges that provide opportunity for growth.

“A lot of the Harkness method is realizing what you know and where the gaps in your knowledge are,” he says. “Failure is inherently part of that process.