A black plastic bin sits next to the 3D printer in Exeter’s Design Lab, the collaborative makerspace 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.

“How does Exeter benefit? It has an instruction system which calls for 12 students to be seated around a table with the instructor to talk things over. If all came from the same social and economic strata, their thinking would be almost identical.

“The scholarship plan gives an economic, geographic and social cross section of the nation and diversified thinking for full discussion of every phase of work in the school.”

—H. Hamilton Bissell to the Miami Daily News, February 15, 1949

Byron Rose ’59 tells the story of his teenage self, “painfully shy” and living in the can’t-get-there-from-here city of Evansville, Indiana, when H. Hamilton Bissell ’29 first came into his life. Rose had been accepted to Exeter on a generous scholarship but had declined the opportunity. That’s when Bissell turned up to talk some sense into him.

“To get to Evansville by train was not easy, but Hammy came and took me and my father out for breakfast,” notes Rose, who was impressed. “I said to my dad, ‘The worst that can happen is I go there for junior year and come back to Indiana afterward.’”

A version of that bacon-and-eggs sales pitch was delivered time and again across the Midwest from 1946 until 1960, with the man simply and affectionately known as “Hammy” making the case to more than 800 young men that Phillips Exeter Academy was the place for them. An English instructor for 13 years before being appointed by the school as its first director of scholarships, Bissell spearheaded an initiative to diversify the Academy’s student body through a comprehensive outreach project. The strategy would enable those boys whose families might not otherwise have the money — or, indeed, even an awareness of the school — to attend Exeter. That proactive effort has had everlasting effects, on the recipients who came to be known collectively as “Hammy’s boys” and on the Academy itself. More than 70 years on, Bissell’s legacy remains vibrant, still full of its original promise.

“I have heard it said that education is America’s magic,” Bissell told Boston Post Magazine in 1949, under the eye-catching headline, “He Scouts for Scholars.” “America is supposed to be a democratic institution. I am sure, however, that economic, religious and racial differences produce attendant inequalities of opportunity among boys and girls.”

In seeking out potential students who were impacted by those limitations, Bissell worked with educational guidance personnel; 4-H, Scout, and Future Farmers leaders; those working with refugees and their families; YMCA officials; and, most famously, newspapermen employing delivery boys.

Rose was delivering newspapers in Evansville when Bissell found him. “It was purely serendipitous: Mr. Ellis, the man who owned the newspaper, had gone to Exeter,” Rose recalls. “I was a good athlete — I was playing basketball and was a runner — but I was also painfully shy, so I said, ‘No.’ Mr. Ellis said, ‘Well, let’s just send in your application. You might not be good enough.’ Which really spurred me on, actually.”

Rose was accepted on an eye-wateringly good scholarship: “Room, board and tuition was $1,600 for the year; we got financial aid for $1,400, so for $200 my parents wouldn’t have me eating at home,” he laughs. At the time, he says, Exeter’s only publication was a book the size of a novel, with dry descriptions of the school’s courses. But Rose found a magazine article on Exeter that touted a calculus option for uppers. That intrigued the keen math student, but he still wasn’t convinced, and turned down the scholarship. That’s when Bissell showed up for breakfast.

The real jewel in that scholarship crown, according to Rose, was that Bissell didn’t just recruit students, he nurtured them on campus as well: “For a kid like me, the school was not a very welcoming place; it was pretty much sink or swim. I was woefully unprepared for some of the classes I was in, and having Hammy around really helped. He was able to steer me to people I could talk to.”

Bissell’s encouragement made the difference for Rose. In turn, Rose, who worked at Morgan Stanley for the bulk of his career, has made a difference to Exeter, serving on its Board of Trustees for 10 years, including three years as chair. “I jumped at the opportunity,” he says, noting that Bissell went out of his way to offer congratulations for Rose’s appointment: “I assume I was the first scholarship boy to be the head of the board, and I know that also pleased him.”

Rose describes serving on Exeter’s Board of Trustees as one of the best professional experiences of his life. “That opportunity to participate wasn’t just a way to contribute, it also meant working with a group of people who sat around the table with a common interest in mind,” Rose explains, inevitably conjuring up Harkness classrooms. “It was a fantastic experience working with all these really incredible people. Being on the board when we gave a eulogy for Hammy when he died was a high point for me. He was a wonderful human being.”

IN HAMMY’S FOOTSTEPS

It was another breakfast meeting that brought Julian Conway Wilson’62 to Exeter. Wilson’s mother, the daughter of Robert Harold Ogle, one of the founders of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first African-American fraternity, was determined to get her son out of segregated Richmond, Virginia. “She got Hammy to come to me,” Wilson says. “She was determined to get me the hell out of Dodge. Hammy used to tease me with that story every time he saw me on campus, that my mother got me into Exeter because she fixed him one of the most wonderful brunches he’d ever had.”

Wilson, like Rose, found Exeter extremely challenging; like Rose, he found sanctuary in Bissell’s humane approach. “Suddenly, I was around a lot of talented, well-prepared, motivated students from all walks of life. Hammy was visionary in his view of diversity for Exeter, and I think he made it a healthier culture. He tried to make sure that we, the scholarship boys, were as adjusted as we could be given Exeter’s culture at the time: He was a nurturing and protecting force at a time when Exeter was basically men against boys. I was pretty stubborn and hard-headed and independent, so I was called to the Dean’s Office at times. But Hammy moderated the trouble I got into, basically saying, ‘Look, he’s not a bad kid, he’s just his own kind of person.’ He gave me counseling, reminding me what a wonderful opportunity I had.”

Wilson incorporated that model of outreach and inclusivity when he attended the University of Pennsylvania, founding the school’s first group for students of color and fostering a welcoming environment, just as Bissell had done at Exeter. “I was always interested in human rights and social justice,” Wilson says. “It’s part of my DNA in every way. When I got to Penn, I had been well prepared at Exeter so I knew how to stand up to things — I knew I could meet another calling and help other students who might not be as well prepared. People who were at Penn with me were extraordinary, but they hadn’t had an Exeter education, so they were taken aback by the rigor and the social exclusion. Our group was there as support and also to work against attrition of students who were less prepared and resourced.”

Wilson, who currently works with the District of Columbia Housing Authority, has pursued that commitment to helping the disenfranchised and underserved throughout his career. “Everything I’ve done has focused on that,” he says. “I wasn’t a great student of Latin — in fact, I had to switch from Latin to German — but I know non sibi. I think we should help other people, love humanity and not feel that we are above others in any way.”

Bissell had discretionary funds to spend on his scholarship boys once they were on campus, too, in case he determined that there was something a student might need that wasn’t within his budget. Peterson had worked his way up to be goaltender on the varsity hockey team, requiring specific skates: “It was not in my family budget to buy them, so [Hammy] went into his cookie jar and bought me a pair of skates. He enabled me to keep skating.”

As a student employee, Peterson also appreciated Hammy’s work with Exeter’s Alumni Affairs Office, where Bissell held various roles starting in 1962, including alumni secretary and associate director of development, cultivating a sense of continuity with Exeter students long after they left campus. “What was really captivating about him in that role,” Peterson says, “was his recollection and memory and sensitivity to the students, especially with those for whom he’d provided the door-opening. You’d go back to campus and there he would be with a big grin, and he’d greet you and ask about your parents and remember them by name; he remembered your hometown and your class, and he knew who your friends were. He was such an avatar for the community nature of the school — the best part of the school, in other words.”

With Carly Kirsch ’20, a Peterson Scholarship recipient, that element of engagement brought Bissell’s overarching legacy nicely home to Exeter’s campus. An avid shot, discus and javelin thrower for the track and field team, Kirsch also has an abiding interest in the sciences and Russian, and a deep appreciation for the opportunities that the Academy offers. “Exeter has forced me to try new things,” she says. “Without going to Exeter, I would not have gotten into track, which is something I now plan on doing in college. Without Exeter, I would have never taken Russian or traveled to Russia for a month last summer. My Russian class has had the same eight people all three years, and we have a really strong bond.”

In a letter Kirsch wrote to Peterson this spring, she said, “From the bottom of my heart, I want to thank you for investing in my education. It is unbelievable the amount of opportunities I have as a 17-year-old girl from a small town in New Hampshire. Every day I get to walk into the largest secondary school library in the world. Twice a week I get to listen to inspiring assembly speakers. And every day I get to be surrounded by some of the most incredible humans whom I can call my friends. I am so lucky to attend Phillips Exeter Academy and I know it wouldn’t be possible without you.”

The legendary Hammy Bissell ’29; P’58 said to me many years ago, “Exeter isn’t what it used to be, and thank God it never was.” Hammy was quoting an alum who had said the same to him many years before. Apparently, we have been reminding ourselves for quite some time that Exeter’s future does not lie in the past, that Exeter has never stayed strong by staying the same.

Lewis Perry, toward the end of his astonishing 32-year tenure as principal, stated, “There is no fundamental incongruity between tradition and development.”

Principal William Saltonstall ’24; P’55, P’59 used a rowing metaphor to describe Dr. Perry’s administration as a “bright beacon,” astern by which the school might keep a “steady course” while “we bend our oars toward the future.” In a speech given at Andover, he stated, “Faculty and students at Andover and Exeter must, it seems to me, be constantly re-examining what we are about.”

This effort to re-examine constantly “what we are about” will continue in the coming academic year. Through the New England Association of Schools and Colleges reaccreditation process and our own strategic planning, we will examine critical issues such as our pursuit of academic excellence; the quality of experiences we provide to students outside the classroom; our financial aid practices and policies; our commitment to building and supporting a diverse, equitable and inclusive community; our progress addressing student wellness and support; and our responsibilities as strong environmental stewards.

These are weighty subjects, and every member of the community has a role to play. The focus will be on the school as a whole and directed always toward the best interests of our students. We will ask hard questions and embrace the challenge inherent in our aspiration to live up to the Deed of Gift. We will value our historic strengths and explore new ideas and new approaches that build on those strengths. In the spirit of a Harkness discussion, we will come to the table keenly interested in hearing what others have to say. Through discussion and collaboration, we will produce collectively the best thinking of our community.

That is where the readers of this column will come in. As our thinking coalesces around specific proposals that we believe will advance the mission of the school, we will share our thinking with you, and ask for your best thoughts in return. And as the need arises, we will ask for your support.

The Deed of Gift states at the end of the first paragraph, “[T]he time of youth is the important period, on the improvement or neglect of which depend the most weighty consequences, to individuals themselves and the community.” At Exeter, we act on that belief every day.

I would like to conclude by expressing on behalf of my family our deep gratitude for the support we have received from the Exeter community since the death of my beloved wife, Mary Rawson, on June 14, 2018. Mary knew Exeter well and believed in the mission of the school. My family and I have been moved by the notes and letters that have recognized Mary’s remarkable qualities and the role she played in the lives of so many.