Take Time to Celebrate Mistakes!
I can remember planning parent presentations for Curriculum Nights, both as an administrator and as a teacher. Besides sharing schedules, routines, and how to best succeed, I would always emphasize the importance of letting your child make a mistake. Think about your own learning and growth. When did you learn the most? When did you feel most accomplished in your learning? We learn most when we make mistakes and find out it is ok to make mistakes. I can vividly remember being in classrooms where making mistakes and taking risks was ok. I felt confident about all of my learning and didn’t shy away from mistakes when I made them but sought feedback on how to improve. In contrast, I also had teachers that shamed students, including me, for silly questions and errors. In these classes I tried my best to blend in, hide, and lacked any confidence to participate in class. Mistakes are opportunities! Mistakes signal students to ask more questions about the specific content or practice more in a specific area. I thrived on this kind of student engagement in my most recent assignment as a teacher of advanced math students and I believe my students did as well. Surprisingly, students who excel are the most afraid of making mistakes. In the classroom the students and I created an environment to celebrate mistakes, seek clarification and feedback about the mistakes and grow from our mistakes. We hung up a poster that all of the students signed that read, “Celebrate Mistakes!” Students asked more questions, talked with each other about their mistakes and celebrated when their mistakes turned into learning moments.
From Edutopia, adapted from an interview with Angela Duckworth:
“Students fear failure because it’s human to fear failure. Nobody likes to make mistakes. When you look at very successful people, though - when you watch commencement speeches, for example - many of them are about learning to embrace failure.”
Take time this summer to make mistakes. Celebrate mistakes. Celebrated mistakes foster risk taking and growth. Learning grows exponentially in these environments.
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