Teach Secondary -Issue 15.1

We all make MISTAKES Teachers sometimes say it ‘doesn’t matter’ if students are wrong, but that might not be a helpful message to send, cautions Colin Foster … I n the bad old days, school students would be punished or shamed for making mistakes. Students wouldn’t speak up in class for fear of being mocked – not just by their peers, but by the teacher if what they said was incorrect. With students afraid of getting things wrong, misunderstandings and misconceptions ended up being buried, in the hope that no one would ever discover them. That’s certainly not an environment conducive to learning, let alone positive wellbeing. Positivemessaging So, how are things looking now, in the modern classroom? Thankfully, teachers no longer consider it acceptable to humiliate students or belittle them for their mistakes. Instead, we’ve come to see mistakes as an entirely natural part of the learning process. We want to value what students say, even when they are incorrect, because it’s by talking about difficulties and bringing them out into the open that we all move forward. Students are encouraged to always ‘have a go’, and not fear being rebuked if they slip up. All of this is good, contributing to a ‘positive error culture’ that in turn produces classroom environments where learning is prioritised and students – we hope – want to be. At the same time, however, I believe there are occasions when this positive messaging can go slightly wrong. I’ve often heard teachers tell their class, ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re wrong’ – which for me, isn’t quite the message that’s likely to be most helpful. The teacher is trying to coax responses from possibly reluctant students, and reassure them that a wrong answer isn’t the end of the world. The teacher here just wants them to have a go and take the risk of making a mistake. They (rightly) want to get around the students’ natural fear of failure, but I think the messaging around achieving these important goals matters. It isn’t so much that it ‘doesn’t matter’ if someone’s wrong, because if that were true, mistakes would have no value. The point is that being wrong is an opportunity to learn – and perhaps a better opportunity to learn than when someone is right! Getting something wrong is what happens just before you learn something. A mistake is therefore an exciting moment – it’s the cue that means you’re about to learn something. The mistake isn’t good in itself, but it can be the basis for something good that later comes out of it. Wanting to be right The reason this matters is that young people generally do want to be right. In fact, young children can often be especially pedantic, and love correcting tiny errors in what adults say – even when it’s debatable whether something’s actually an error at all: “ Can you pick up your coat, please? ” “ It isn’t a coat, it’s a jacket! ” Young people want to know what’s what, and it’s good that they care about being right or wrong. It’s a short step from ‘ It doesn’t matter if you’re wrong ’ to simply thinking ‘ It doesn’t matter ’. It’s like playing tennis without a net – if it doesn’t matter when you’re wrong, then presumably it doesn’t matter when you’re right. Why are we even bothering with school, if being wrong is no problem? The point is that it does “Amistake is anexciting moment – it’s the cue that means you’reabout to learn something” 34 teachwire.net/secondary