How can adventure sports help pupils learn from failure?
The benefits of teaching pupils how to manage failure are obvious and an established part of education.
However, failures in everyday life can be quite an abstract, hard to grasp and often (hopefully) quite few and far between.
With quality risk management procedures, adventure sports can create wonderful opportunities to explore boundaries and ‘play with failure’.
Anyone who has dabbled in watersports for example, might be familiar with that feeling when you’re out on the water on a cold day, keeping your hair dry and not getting water down the back of your wetsuit. Then BOOM. You make a mistake and fall in. Freezing water pours down the back of your wetsuit. This failure is certainly not abstract!
However, you quickly climb back on your board and before long you’re trying new things that you were to nervous to try before. Now you’re in a position to start learning. Now that fear of failure (falling in and getting wet!) has gone your learning accelerates and you start discovering new things and having more fun.
If you can transfer this mentality into other areas of life then you are on to a winner.