Teaching Fails : Celebration and Adaptation

Abstract

This paper is about publicly (or at least in our teaching community) celebrating those occasional classroom SNAFUs, those dreaded teaching fails, which we would all rather put behind us as soon as we stop cringing.  Why celebrate them you ask?  I suggest that there is no greater way of developing trust, centering students, and ultimately creating a powerful teaching community than to find communal joy in the occasional classroom catastrophe.  In exploring the celebration of teaching fails, this article will begin by briefly explaining and giving examples of what this looks like. Next, I will talk about some of the benefits of creating a culture that celebrates teaching fails - individual benefits, community benefits, pedagogical benefits, and benefits to our students.  And I will talk about some of the roadblocks - cultural, institutional, and personal - between us and celebrating teaching fails - and suggest some ways of leaping over, skirting around, or pushing through these roadblocks.  And in the second part of the article I am going to talk about those moments when, in mid-stream, you realize that you are on the precipice of such a fail, and about how to adapt in medias res to turn a class around mid-fail.  

Keywords: Legal Education, Teaching community, Pedagogy, Classroom climate, Classroom failures