The times that people could stop learning when they left the formal education system are over. In today’s society people and especially young people have to learn during and for the rest of their life in all areas of life meaning both personally and professionally. Very often people who do or did not well in school (the formal education system) feel they cannot learn or don’t have the learning skills they need to learn what they would like or need. They don’t know what their talents and passions are, what their life mission is, what learning goals they want to set for themselves let alone how to achieve those goals. They dont realise that failing is an essential part of learning and because of the negative connotation of failing they stay away from learning in general. They don’t want to fail because failing is very often considered a sign of weakness and non ability. More and more research shows that people who are able to see failing and making mistakes as part of a learning and development process are more successful in those learning processes and in life in general. With this project we want to show that failing is a part of learning especially self-directed learning (a process in which the individual learner takes the initiative, with the support of others to diagnose their learning needs, formulate learning goals, identify support for learning, select and implement learning strategies and evaluate learning outcomes) and that if learners are able to embrace failing as part of the learning process and as a very powerful learning moment they can achieve so much more. Standing on the side and judging other people’s failures during learning is the easy thing to do, getting into a learning process yourself and embracing failure as an empowering part of learning is the hard but courageous thing to do. Coaching practise shows that people who take that very important first step and base their next steps on the information the first failing attempt teaches them move forward faster and are less scared of failing in the next steps because they know that failing is 1) a source of information for next learning steps and 2) part of moving forward. During this 18 month long project on 'failing forward' as a concept we want to train educators (youth workers, trainers, coaches ect) in how to use 'failing forward' as a concept and a practise when they support young people in their learning processes. The objectives of the partnership are: - develop a common definition of the concept 'failing forward' with all involved partner organisations and discover how working with this concept impacts both the individual youth workers and trainers involved and the way they work with their young people - develop and implement a three step training (two training courses and an in between phase) about failing forward as a learning concept that focuses on the personal and professional development of the supporters of learning who want to become specialists in 'failing forward' (training 1, only for youth workers and trainers) and use it in their practise of working with young people (training 2 both youth workers and trainers together with young people) - try-out and develop the concept of 'self-directed learning' as the learning approach for this partnership. All the partner organisations strongly believe in the benefits of self-directed learning where the focus lies on the learning needs of the participants/learners and the learners take the initiative and responsibility for coming up with a learning strategy to fulfill their learning needs. - build the capacity of the partner organisations in 'failing forward', self-directed learning and co-active coaching to support learning processes by intensively working together for 18 months. - share the outcomes and (intellectual) outputs of this partnership with both the wider community of trainers and youth workers the partner organisations have direct access to and the general public and society by starting the failing forward movement during this partnership. For the failing forward movement we will involve the young people the partner organisations work with and who will be part of the second training course.
The times that people could stop learning when they left the formal education system are over. In today’s society people and especially young people have to learn during and for the rest of their life in all areas of life meaning both personally and professionally. Very often people who do or did not well in school (the formal education system) feel they cannot learn or don’t have the learning skills they need to learn what they would like or need. Because they failed before in learning they assume they will fail again and do not even bother trying. More and more research shows though that people who are able to see failing and making mistakes as part of a learning and development process are more successful in those learning processes and in life in general. With this project we wanted to make the participant aware that failing is a part of learning especially self-directed learning (a process in which the individual learner takes the initiative, with the support of others to diagnose their learning needs, formulate learning goals, identify support for learning, select and implement learning strategies and evaluate learning outcomes) and that if learners are able to embrace failing as part of the learning process and as a very powerful learning moment they can learn more and implement it better because they developed fail-resilience. Fail-resilience is the ability to deal with failing during learning constructively: the learner has both the ability and the support he/she needs to look at failing as a rich learning experience, to reflect on it, get all the learning out of it and then get back in and try again. A community of support of people who are also playing big and willing to fail for the sake of learning and living the life they want to turned out an essential element of developing this fail-resilience. During this 18 month long project on 'failing forward' as a concept we trained educators (youth workers, trainers, coaches ect) in how to use 'failing forward' as a concept and a practise when they support young people in their learning processes. The objectives of the partnership were: - develop a common definition of the concept 'fail forward' shared by all involved partner organisations and developing a concrete way of implementing this concept with young people - develop and implement a three step training (two training courses and an in between phase) about failing forward as a learning concept that focuses on the personal and professional development of the supporters of learning who want to become specialists in 'fail forward' (training 1, only for youth workers and trainers) and use it in their practise of working with young people (training 2 both youth workers and trainers together with young people) - try-out and develop the concept of 'self-directed learning' as the learning approach for this partnership. - build the capacity of the partner organisations in 'failing forward', self-directed learning and co-active coaching to support learning processes by intensively working together for 18 months. - share the outcomes and of this partnership with both the wider community of trainers and youth workers the partner organisations have direct access to and the general public and society by starting the failing forward movement during this partnership. For the failing forward movement we involved the young people the partner organisations work with who will be part of the second training course. The participating organizations were Molde Kommune (coordinator), Take Initiative vzw and Sveitarfelagid Skagafjordur. Stichting Umotion left after the kick off meeting as agreed with the Norwegian NA. Molde Kommune and Sveitarfelagid Skagafjordur are organizations that work directly with young people in the community while Take Initiative vzw is an organizations specialized in self-directed learning and training facilitators of learning in supporting self-directed processes. This mix of complementary profiles worked really well for this partnership. Main activities: the 3 step training proces: - training/learning activity 1 with youth workers and supporters of learning focused on the development and implementation of the 'fail froward' concept in their practice (9-15 Feb 2015) - an in between phase where we focus both on the professional and the personal development of the participants: they were implementing activities in their own context with their young people and up to 3 coaching sessions to support their personal and professional learning process ( March - August 2015) - training learning activity 2 for youth workers and young people: 1) introducing the 'fail resilience' - concept as an essential part of self-directed and life-long learning 2)starting the Fail forward-movement by actions in the streets of Brussels and workshops in Sint-Ursula in Lier (a secondary school) and 3) making plans for the future implementation of everything we learned in this 3 step approach.