Failure in Focus: Unpacking the Impact of Video-Based Reflections on Museum Educator Practices

As engineering becomes more common in museums and other informal learning spaces, educators are often expected to support young people in the moment—especially when designs fail or don’t work as planned. Yet there are few resources that focus on how educators can plan for and respond to these real-time challenges. In this study, we worked with museums across the United States to develop and refine a professional development program that helps educators better notice, make sense of, and respond to youths’ experiences with failure during engineering design activities. The program centered on reflective discussions using video from educators’ own practice. In this presentation, we share what we learned about how this approach influenced educators’ thinking and teaching. Drawing on interviews, reports, and evaluations from 19 partner museums, we found several clear patterns of growth: educators began to rethink failure as a valuable part of learning, adopted new instructional strategies, built stronger communities with one another, invested in their own professional growth, and sustained the professional development within their organizations. Together, these findings suggest that video-based professional development can meaningfully shift how educators support young people through failure while also building a shared community focused on learning through challenge and iteration.