Learning From Mistakes: Easier Said Than Done

By Zak Cohen

In this blog, Zak Cohen challenges teachers to focus on helping students learn from mistakes as opposed to trying to teach them to perform without errors. He traces the mindset of perfection in educational outcomes to a study in 1963 in which “pigeons could be taught to discriminatively peck a red circle as opposed to a green circle.” However, innovation, in which the United States leads the world, is achieved through taking risks and failure, and failure promotes learning.

Mistakes can help learners self-monitor and become aware of what they need to learn and what strategies they need to change to improve. Knowing how to learn from mistakes and being willing to do so prepares them for changes they will experience in their lives.

Like a person’s credit card statements, which reveal what is valued in their lives, teachers’ gradebooks show what is considered to be important for the students they teach.

Cohen writes, “If you’re like me, you believe that mistakes provide students with an opportunity to learn. Does your gradebook agree? If you check your gradebook and find that it doesn’t, don’t panic. In fact, you should celebrate this finding! By identifying this existing incoherence, you’ve elucidated the first step on your journey in creating a classroom culture wherein learning from mistakes isn’t haphazard but is an intentional byproduct of your instructional choices.”

He closes by recommending that teachers create an action plan to rework their objectives.
Here are the details.

There is a linked study, which states: “If the goal is optimal performance in high-stakes situations, it may be worthwhile to allow and even encourage students to commit and correct errors while they are in low-stakes learning situations rather than to assiduously avoid errors at all costs.”
You can read it here.