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What failing in the learning journey feels like

Updated Friday, 12 June 2026

How can educators better support students who fail? Drawing on personal and professional experience, Karen Storey and Vicky Kiddey share their insights. 

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Failing an assignment at whatever point in your learning journey is not simply an academic event – it can feel deeply personal, almost existential. Students often describe an overwhelming mix of shock, disbelief, grief, and shame. These mix of emotions can raise questions regarding self and study.

How the feedback of a failure is delivered can impact how one feels and reacts to a failed grade. Often, feedback that is given is brief, procedural, and detached — written feedback is the main source of feedback, but without a space for dialogue, it becomes static and a verdict rather than a conversation. The opportunity for verbal feedback doesn’t often exist.

This kind of transactional feedback contrasts sharply with what pedagogical research describes as formative, dialogic, or compassionate feedback. In the emotional landscape of failure, what’s needed is connection, reflection and reassurance, not just a formal mechanism for contesting marks. The student is not only receiving bad news but doing so without context, empathy, or continuity. The student may be left feeling processed instead of supported.

Do all students feel the same?

Yes, and yet few speak openly about it. Failing can feel taboo, especially in higher education cultures that valorise success, resilience, and self-management. Students who fail often withdraw socially and academically, assuming they are alone in their experience.

In reality, many students share similar feelings of shock, loss, and confusion. They express a desire for peer connection, for someone to say, ‘I’ve been there.’ The absence of visible failure narratives within the student community or institutional discourse can reinforce stigma, making it harder to re-engage.

When support received during the learning journey vanishes, failure feels like an endpoint. But when support continues with someone listening, explaining, and inviting the student back into dialogue, failure can become a site of learning, resilience, and personal growth.

The question is not simply why students fail, but how we accompany them through it.

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