Commentary – Let’s switch cognitive gears: leading school improvement through learning from failures and successes

Indeed, the current special issue spans diverse studies conducted internationally in the European, American and Middle Eastern contexts, which mostly call on researchers and school leaders to investigate failures as a vital mechanism for promoting school learning and improvement. This framework involves the conceptualization of failures as a crucial school resource to be identified, analyzed and leveraged to enable planning of effective directions for change. According to this perspective, school failures are a necessary condition for strategic school improvement. Each of the contributions to this special issue adds important perspectives, offering conceptual and empirical updates to school leadership, research and policy.

Yet, I would like to suggest broadening the framework for school learning and improvement, to incorporate not only retrospective learning from failed events and processes but also learning opportunities embedded in past successes and satisfactory incidents. I contend that such a holistic approach, which combines learning from mistakes together with a more positive way to address the complexity of school life, may furnish an integrative complementary framework for school improvement. In this commentary, I start by briefly explaining the learning from failure perspective, and then I analyze how the articles in this special issue are conceptualized vis-à-vis failure analysis. I next provide the learning from success framework and, most importantly, conceptualize an integrated framework for learning from both successes and failures.