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Dear all,

<<I received a lot of replies already, and some replies showed that I wasn't clear in my approach, so I update the request below.>>

I'm looking for a simple (but dramatic) classroom exercise – preferably experiential or physical – that can teach (undergraduate) students *how to not fear failure (i.e. mistakes or errors)*.  Ideally, it could be done inside the classroom and you could teach it to 40 students (from all majors and ages) in 3 hours in a non-boring way, and without requiring any kind of verbal presentation.

Of course, failure can range from catastrophic to trivial.  An absence of fear of catastrophic failure is often (let's face it) stupid and foolish and/or crazy.  Thus, I suppose I can update my request to ask for exercises on how to teach students to not fear mistakes or "non-catastrophic failure" from taking action.*  What I need students to realize is that entrepreneurship requires experimentation, which can lead to failure. I need them to recognize that there is such a thing as making mistakes "that you are willing to make." Many of my students, before the fact, aren't willing to differentiate between those two types of mistakes: mistakes that NOBODY should want to make, and mistakes that one should be willing to make. (Of course, to some extent, that requires teaching students to have taste in mistakes.  That ultimately is a multi-year or life-long exercise for most people.  I have 3 hours to punch this message home.)

Ideally, the exercise will also help students to puncture their self-idealism and their perception that they must be idealized by others.  I'm also open to suggestions on how to guide my students immediately after this kind of exercise to investigate and understand their own emotional state (whether that's guilt, shame, disappointment, or excitement, curiosity, or humor).

I have thought of this matter before, and I have some ideas, but I wonder out loud whether anybody else has already addressed this in class.

-Chihmao Hsieh

Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship

University of Amsterdam

* Of course, inactivity is often a mistake and leads to failure (until the goal is ultimately dismissed).  I'm not talking about teaching students to accept their own laziness.

Hi. It sounds like you are trying to get students to recognize that they can take action under ambiguous contexts. Give them a quick survey to see whether their regulatory focus is promotion or prevention focused. Split up the class accordingly.  Give them a task that is stressful to their cognitive disposition, i.e., to complete the task, the promotion focused are forced to bypass the route that maximizes their gain and the prevention focused students are forced to take the path that recognizes a loss.  For each group, the other path, while more appealing to their cognitive disposition, will lead to sudden death. After all, students perceive to be failure and how it shapes their behavior will differ based on their goal orientations.  Artificially stressing their natural disposition heightens their awareness of the actions they are taking, the context in which they are taking them, and that they completed the task although the path was less optimal for them (i.e., failure).

Sharon Simmons,

Asst. Professor of Entrepreneurship

William Paterson University

(and forever Syracuse U.)