Making Mistakes

Last week, I went to a dance class. I'm a pretty dreadful dancer, and it's no surprise that I was a complete beginner. It went really well, and I enjoyed the successes of getting to the end of each dance in tact - until the last dance. As soon as it started, someone called across to tell me I should be doing something, although I thought I should be standing still. No one had said that I should be doing this thing, but it was obvious to everyone else, as they were more experienced. It was really tough after that to catch up with the dance, and to figure out what was going on, and I got more and more confused until I gave up and ended up being pulled and jostled through to the end. I was feeling pretty cross with myself and with the instructors for not making it clear to a beginner. I felt that I was dreadful at dancing, and that it was pointless to try to improve.

As I was heading home, the parallels jumped out at me. The times when a child panics in class because they don't 'get it', and I tell them to wait - I'll help them later - but they feel the class is running along without them. The times when a student declares a test 'stupid' before they even try, because of a previous bad experience. The many students who give up when they start to find something hard, and look for someone else to blame.

So what can we do about this? How can I make failure less damaging to kids self-belief and attitude, and to my own? Someone once told me never to start by saying that something was easy. It puts the students in a lose-lose situation: if they can do it, that's no big deal, because it's easy. If they can't, well, they must be really dumb, because it's easy. The converse can help here, I think. If the teacher starts off by saying 'this is really tricky', it instantly becomes more ok to make mistakes. If the dancing instructor had said 'this is a tough dance', I'd have felt better when I went wrong.

We can get even more explicit than that though, and I've been trialling it this week with my youngest students. 'This topic is really tough. You guys are probably going to make loads of mistakes, but that's ok, because that's how we learn best.' When mistakes are made, I've been quietly observing them and then writing them on the board in an altered form for everyone to discuss, pointing out how useful the mistakes are. Most kids didn't recognise their own mistakes on the board, because I'd changed the numbers, but the ones who did didn't seem to mind.

I think this can only get us some of the way. I don't want to get into discussing the 'learning objective' culture in detail, but it seems to me that if you have a fixed objective, failure is always going to be more problematic. If it's open ended, not being able to do something is ok. Obviously we need kids to be focussed and have goals, but I think much of their learning should still be open-ended. They don't need to be driven to a specific goal every lesson, and when they instead set off and see where they end up, without fear of failing to meet a criteria, they allow themselves to make mistakes.