CRUSH SCHOOL

5644 1st Avenue South Minneapolis, MN, 55419

I blog on Brain-Based Learning, Metacognition, EdTech, and Social-Emotional Learning. I am the author of the Crush School Series of Books, which help students understand how their brains process information and learn. I also wrote The Power of Three: How to Simplify Your Life to Amplify Your Personal and Professional Success, but be warned that it's meant for adults who want to thrive and are comfortable with four letter words.

Mistakes Are What It Takes

July 05, 2022  /  Oskar Cymerman

Mistakes are what it takes to learn better
“Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily.”
— Thomas Szasz

Change How Mistakes Are Looked At

This one will be hard. Jumping off a building without a parachute or at least a bungee cord to learn about gravity is risky. It’s also either crazy, or really stupid, or both, because the risk involved is not reasonable. And while this example seems drastic, it might not be far off from the way many students perceive taking risks - asking questions, volunteering answers, and being wrong - in school.

So how do we change this classroom risk aversion?

Expect and Respect Mistakes

expect and respect mistakes

We can create a culture of mistake making in our classrooms by communicating to our students at the beginning of the school year that we expect and want them to make mistakes, because learning is more memorable when we inspect and correct our mistakes.

As teachers, we need to communicate this message frequently, because behavior modification takes time and effort.

In addition, we can be honest about our own mistakes, point them out when we make them, analyze them, and correct them as they happen. I found that students respect me more and I build more authentic relationships when I admit my mess-ups.

Inspect and Correct Mistakes

Inspect and correct your mistakes

How does making, inspecting, and correcting our mistakes help us learn better?

We tend to feel embarrassed when we get something wrong in front of our peers, which makes these experiences more memorable than instances in which we guess correctly. And the benefits of such blush moments, evidenced by the sudden rush of blood to our heads and visible on our faces, cannot be understated. Emotions do wanders for the memory-making process of information encoding.

Additionally, we tend to put time into careful processing of mistakes we make as we do not want to be wrong again, especially about the same thing. We want to show we’re smart by improving ourselves and learning from our mistakes. Such processing and reprocessing leads to deeper knowledge. Deeper knowledge is the definition of true learning.

The key for students is to keep trying, knowing they will be wrong at times.

The key for teachers is to make mistakes part of the learning menu (FREE to you). And tips are required.

“If no mistake you have made, losing you are. A different game you should play.”
— Yoda

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Hi! I'm Oskar.

I teach, write, and create to make teaching easier and learning simpler.

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categories / Learning
tags / teaching teens, deeper learning, independence, lifelong learning, learning, kids, active learning, teacher resources, instructional resources, classroom strategies, hybrid learning, in-person learning, distance learning, remote learning, teaching strategies, teaching methods

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