Failure and Creativity

Lesson Summary:
This complete, ready-to-use ESL video lesson plan explores failure and its role in the creative process. Aimed at Upper Intermediate (B2) to Advanced (C1) learners, it engages students through vocabulary building, video analysis, discussion of quotations, comprehension questions, roleplay, and a follow-up article titled The Courage to Create: Overcoming Fear of Failure. Teachers get a structured, thought-provoking package designed to develop critical thinking, improve communication skills, and inspire students to embrace risk and creativity.

Learning Objectives:
• To introduce students to the theme of failure and its role in the creative process
• To explore and reflect on the nature of creativity and its relationship with risk and mistake-making
• To expand vocabulary related to failure, creativity and cognitive processes
• To develop students’ listening, viewing and reading comprehension skills
• To improve students’ speaking and writing skills through roleplay and personal reflection
• To enhance students’ visual representing skills through multimodal composition tasks

Lesson Activities:
• Pre-lesson discussion on failure and creativity
• Vocabulary development activities
• Prediction tasks before watching the video
• Viewing and comprehension questions
• Analysis and discussion of key ideas
• Creative roleplay activity
• Reading and discussing a follow-up article
• Writing reflection based on video and article
• Critical thinking discussion

Learner Type:
Upper Intermediate (B2) – Advanced (C1) mature teens and adults

Language Focus:
• Vocabulary related to failure
• Vocabulary related to creativity
• Vocabulary related to cognitive processes

Transform Your English Classroom with This Film English Multimodal Lesson

This ESL video lesson plan is built around a carefully selected short video and designed using the exclusive Multimodal Approach– an innovative methodology that integrates traditional language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) with viewing – the active process of analysing and interpreting multimodal texts – and representing – creating multimodal texts. This pedagogically rich approach mirrors how communication works in the real world, through a combination of language, image, sound, gesture and spatial design, making the lesson more engaging, relevant and effective.

This ESL video lesson plan plan consists of a complete, ready-to-use package that includes:

• A thought-provoking short video
• A detailed teacher’s guide with step-by-step instructions
• A pre-viewing vocabulary glossary to scaffold understanding
• Comprehension, discussion and critical thinking questions
• Creative post-viewing tasks such as roleplays, writing prompts and reflective activities
• A thematically linked reading text to reinforce language and deepen understanding
• A final task encouraging learners to create their own multimodal compositions (e.g. vlogs, posters, infographics or social media posts)

Benefits for Teachers:

• Save hours of preparation with a fully developed, flexible lesson plan
• Engage students through compelling stories and real-world themes such as emotional intelligence, character, values, empathy, personal development, identity, relationships, global issues and social issues
• Build classroom routines that integrate multimodal literacy naturally and progressively
• Foster more inclusive and differentiated learning by using varied modes of input
• Rely on a trusted methodology backed by educational research and grounded in the theories of Vygotsky, Kress, Mayer and Krashen

Benefits for Learners:

• Develop communicative competence and confidence through integrated skill-building
• Expand vocabulary and improve listening and reading comprehension through repeated, meaningful exposure
• Think critically and creatively while exploring powerful social and emotional themes
• Create authentic, personalised multimodal projects that reflect their own voice and ideas
• Strengthen emotional intelligence and intercultural awareness through affective engagement with multimodal texts

Whether you’re teaching in a secondary school, university or adult education context, Film English lesson plans offer a dynamic, research-informed pathway to meaningful language learning. Join thousands of teachers worldwide who are transforming their classrooms with the Multimodal Approach and helping their students learn English—and live through English—more fully.

Watch the short video.