Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, before going on to be one of the world’s most famous players.

Henry Ford declared bankruptcy twice before finally getting Ford Motors off the ground.

Walt Disney was fired from an early job for “not being creative enough” and his first studio went bankrupt before he hit on success with Walt Disney Studios.

Many successful people have failed spectacularly in the past.

And this is no coincidence.

Many of them will even say that failure was imperative for their success. Through it they became stronger. They learned. And they grew.

Nothing is perfect from the start. It’s completely fine not to get it right the first time.

But if you can dissect what didn’t work and why, you have valuable insider information to make improvements and try again. Stuff you never would have known if you’d never tried.

That’s what makes the difference.

Some people are so scared of failure that they never even try.

And if you never try, success isn’t even an option.

As a teacher, you can make a huge difference, by teaching students to embrace failure. To see it as something positive rather than something that ruins you.

If students feel that failure is just a way to help them move forward, this will give them the courage they need to take their first steps and to try new things.

Here are some tips on what you can do in your classroom to help instill this mindset in your students and set them up for success (albeit with plenty of failures along the way):

“I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that do not work.” -Thomas Edison

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” -Robert F. Kennedy

“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.” -Henry Ford

How to Embrace Failure in the Classroom

1. Give students a chance to correct their errors

Wrong answers shouldn’t be the end of the story, they’re an opportunity to learn. Give students the option to resubmit assignments and tests with the corrected answers and an explanation of why their new answer is, in fact, correct. Allow students to earn back partial credit on questions they get right the second time around.

2. Lead by example

Forgot to photocopy both sides of a class handout? Realized you explained a math concept incorrectly? If you make a mistake, don’t try to cover it up and don’t become negative. Laugh about it and accept it without shame. If students see that even the teacher makes mistakes but recovers gracefully and honestly, they are likely to do the same.

3. Introduce a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) stage of projects

There’s something very final about a classroom deadline, whereas in the real world there’s no such thing as a single deadline for completing a project. There are countless iterations of a project and opportunities to improve. When launching a new product or service, many businesses aim for an MVP. This first stage of the project enables them to test that they are on the right track, gather feedback, and make changes. Rather than having one hard deadline for big projects in your classroom try giving students their own MVP, and teach them not to expect perfection the first time around.

4. Hold a student feedback session

Train students to seek and take feedback from their peers (and yourself). Students should learn not to take flaws being pointed out as a negative but as a chance to improve. Many teachers like to structure peer-to-peer feedback by asking kids to highlight each other’s strengths and areas for improvement so that students aren’t overwhelmed with the negatives. We’ve seen reading teachers call these “glows and grows” and math teachers use “+ and ∆” to create a classroom language around giving feedback.

5. Encourage students to find their strengths

Not all students will be great at giving an oral presentation, so it may not always be best to require the same final product from all students. When assigning a major project, allow students to propose alternative methods of delivery that play to their strengths.

For example, maybe a student can give a much better presentation with an animated powerpoint or if they can script, film, and edit their presentation in a video, rather than presenting on the spot. By creating rubrics and assignments that allow for multiple modes of presentation, you will not only open up much greater room for creativity, but you will also teach students that failure in one arena doesn’t mean failure overall. Sometimes we need to find what our strengths are.

Use these techniques to teach students to fail forward and learn from their mistakes and you will find that students are more creative, take more risks, and persevere through difficult tasks much more than if you value perfection the first time around.