Overview
As educators, we want our students to rise to the occasion of learning challenging material. However, it is very difficult to establish a sense of safety to engage deeply with challenging material when an environment feels hierarchical and evaluative to students. By normalizing the process of making mistakes—lessening the sting of a wrong answer or a low grade—teachers can focus students' attention on learning, rather than on continuously proving their capability.
Through this activity, you will be able to:
- Promote students' confidence to take intellectual risks.
- Normalize mistakes in your classroom.
- Establish a culture that communicates that all students have the potential to achieve at high levels.
Conducting the Practice
Review your lesson plan and identify 1 to 2 questions that provide valuable opportunities for classroom discussion. Generate a few sentence stems you can work from as a default to help to facilitate discussion and validate students who take risks during the lesson. Of course you will want to respond to students based on the content of the problem and the specific mistakes they make, but having a few framing statements can make a big difference. For example:
- Walk me through your thinking here...
- Can someone build on that...
- Thanks for having the courage to go first. What do we think about that answer?
- I love that you were willing to take the risk and go first. Can you explain your thought process?
Your goal should be to incentivize students to do their best thinking and be able to explain their answers, while normalizing errors. Discussion between students should simulate internal thinking—there isn't any downside to a wrong answer if it is thought out and justified. Students should consider their peers' answers as useful contributions to their own thinking, not as mere right or wrong answers.
During the lesson, use the sentence stems that you generated and try the following strategies to normalize error during discussion:
- Have students explain and/or substantiate their answers prior to finding out if it was correct or not.
- Publicly acknowledge the courage it takes to offer a well-supported answer, even if it is incorrect.
- Ask other students to build on each other's answers, pulling out what they agree with, even if the first response is incorrect; even mistakes have value in building towards knowledge.
Consider videotaping yourself facilitating classroom discussions and using the tape to analyze the way you respond to wrong answers in the moment.
Survey students on their perceptions of the value/importance of errors, evidence-based thinking, and mastery to see if you have been successful in framing errors as a natural part of the learning process.
This practice was adapted from the Affirming Identities Guide developed by the Learning and Development Group at the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research in partnership with PERTS.