The Account Of Something That Did Not Work

It is the more useful post and the more rarely written one, for obvious reasons.

Writing about failure in public is exposing, and pretending otherwise is unhelpful. Colleagues may read it. So might people who form judgements about your competence. The discomfort is real and it is worth weighing rather than dismissing, because you are the one who bears it. What can be said is that the discomfort is generally larger in anticipation than in fact, and that accounts of things that did not work are usually received far better than the writer expects, because most readers recognise their own week in them.

There is a way of writing these that helps. Describe what you intended, what you actually did, and what happened, keeping the three separate. Resist assigning blame, especially to students, since a post that explains a failure by reference to the people in the room is not an account of your practice at all. Be honest about what you do not know: often the truthful position is that something did not work and you are not certain why, and saying so is more useful than a confident cause you cannot support.

Avoid the redemption arc as well. There is a strong pull to finish with the lesson learned, the adjustment made, the thing that worked in the end. Sometimes that is what happened. Often it is not, and the post is truer if it stops at the point your understanding actually stops. Readers do not need the ending. They need the description.