When Failure is Imminent A certain number of students fail classes every session. This is a hard fact. While we do everything in our power to help students succeed in the early weeks of class, some students will arrive at a point of no return where they no longer can pass a class. Our messages now need to shift. Confronting failure is a serious blow to a student’s ego, make no bones about it. How can an instructor mitigate the circumstances and nurture a failing student's willingness to take the class again next session? And feel good about doing it? If you teach a class with a typically high fail rate many repeats and three-peats will share their past experiences with you regarding their failures, while others you discover through TURNITIN when they resubmit her/ her own failing work. A good number of these students can be successful in your class, but it’s often up to you and how you enable their success. A good way to start a dialogue is to ask the student to show you past work along with instructor's comments. This way you have a starting point to help with areas of non-mastery. The sooner you can get a student engaged in proactively learning, the more successful your collaboration. Let me put this into perspective. If there are 30 sections of a course and each instructor saves one student who had previously failed and was at risk of dropping, you have populated an entire section in the next class session. One more instructor gets assigned a class. If all 30 students had dropped, that is a cancelled section and a teacher without a class. What if you were the instructor who lost the section due to lack of enrollment?