About the Workshop
We increasingly see engineering students who are afraid of failure, who avoid taking risks, and who focus on getting A’s instead of engaging in the difficult and sometimes contrarian act of learning. Fostering a productive failure mindset is an ongoing challenge to developing an EM in our students. The Learning from Failure with Mastery-Based Learning (LFF) workshop will teach you how to create and implement teaching tools that will help students develop a mindset of productive failure and risk-taking at one of four scales: 1) single-lecture activities, 2) course projects, 3) individual courses taught with mastery-based learning, and 4) cohesive competency-based curriculum.
- When: July 21 - 24, 2025.
- Where: Hyatt Regency Bloomington, Minneapolis, MN
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- Who Should Attend: Faculty from any discipline, of any experience level, who desire for their students to take more learning risks, learn from rather than avoid failure, and prioritize learning rather than getting a grade.
- Cost*: $3,500 per person.
*Registration cost includes workshop attendance, airfare, lodging, select meals, one year of coaching and consulting, and access to a library of workshop materials.
What To Expect From the Workshop
Everything you learn from the facilitation and coaching team and other participants can be immediately applied to your context and topics of interest.
By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:
- Explain how EM is related to productive failure and risk-taking.
- Identify their own failure tolerance and characteristics of others (students and colleagues) who are risk/failure tolerant.
- Practice failure-based learning activities that can be easily incorporated into a single lecture period.
- Create modifications to a course project and its assessment that embrace risk-taking and productive failure.
- Compare and contrast assessment approaches that select (traditional) vs develop (MBL) talent and relate those to EM.
- Rethink how a course they teach could be transitioned to a mastery-based structure and create a course syllabus and initial set of assessments.
- Imagine and discuss how their engineering curriculum could be radically transformed through large-scale competency assessment into a cohesive environment promoting students’ productive failure and risk-taking in learning.
- Draft an ASEE abstract, ideally with workshop co-authors, on the failure-based tool they have developed.
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