Level: lower intermediate to advanced

• Tell your students a failure of yours. Choose a medium sized failure as your model will influence what they write and so should be neither trivial nor catastrophic.
  
  
• Ask the students to group in threes or fours and tell each-other the story of a failure , a sporting one, a school one, a personal one.
  
  
• Ask each student to work on her own and write the story of her failure but in the third person. She stands outside the failure and describes it as happening out there, outside herself.
  
  
• Now ask each student to write 5 sentences about how the failure has been useful.
  
  
• The students return to their small groups and read their two pieces of writing to the others.
  
  
• General feedback time.