You may have seen advice that says ‘make your classroom a place where students feel safe to make mistakes’. It turned up recently in an excellent roundtable podcast about ‘checking for understanding’; a culture of error is essential. Sound advice, but what exactly does that mean?

Because… it’s very likely that a student thinks one or more of the following:

Numbers 1 – 4 are a perfectly reasonable human reaction. Acceptance in our peer group is an evolutionary ‘necessity’ for adolescents in particular – more here. Number 5 is entirely within the remit of the teacher. The range of issues means we need a range of strategies.

Strategy 1: Explaining how we learn

Doing an introductory session about how we learn makes a lot of things easier because it gives everyone a common language for talking about what is happening in class, and dealing with mistakes is no exception. Additionally, brains are prediction machines. Doing a question and getting it wrong will make the brain sit up and listen. It’s very interested in situations where predictions don’t match what happens.

Strategy 2: Demystifying ‘smart’

Calling any student (or anyone) ‘smart’ is a gamble, and I will fess up that this is not a gamble I take any more. In most cases the perception of a person being ‘smart’ is highly correlated to other things, like what they know already about the matter in hand. Being perceived as ‘smart’ in one arena says nothing about other arenas. So, that’s an easy win with students. ‘Smart’ means someone already knows a lot about this topic, and that’s easy to fix for you. No reason to think you are ‘lesser’; they happen to know a bit more, but so could you. I throw in, for good measure, that ‘perception of being smart’ is highly correlated with the number of books you’ve read. Just saying.

Strategy 3: Making mistakes myself

I remember being terrified of making mistakes in class as a novice teacher, especially with A level (AP) classes. I spent hours preparing every A level lesson to try to avoid it, but of course I still made mistakes. Now I realize how many tricks I missed by trying to avoid that. I know it’s easy (and uncomfortable) to say ‘make your own mistakes visible’ but I’ve found it a really helpful shift. I even have a tally on the board of how many mistakes I’d made that week to try to normalize it. You can’t say ‘everyone makes mistakes’ without making some yourself.

Strategy 4: Having lots of low stakes/no-stakes work

One way that it can be fine to make mistakes is to have situations where it really doesn’t matter if you do make a mistake. My go-to strategy here is mini-whiteboards (MWB). First, I explain that if you don’t know the answer then this is perfectly acceptable:

They started calling it the Big Fat Question Mark. I realize now that a question mark is a stepping stone to a mistake. The great thing about mini-whiteboards is that it’s not permanent. I hadn’t realized how important that was until a class who were using MWBs for the first time requested that we do the entirety of a lesson on them.

“Why would we do that?” I said.
“Because it’s not writing” they said.
“But you would be writing all lesson?” I said.
“But it doesn’t count” they said.

It’s not permanent, and that’s what matters to them.

Strategy 5: Dealing with the ‘100%’ issue

As Dylan Wiliam said in that podcast: “Mistakes are proof that the work I’m giving you will help you smarter”. I wish I’d had this in my repertoire 35 years ago. For some students anything less than 100% is a problem, but that’s the problem. It takes a while to work this through, and I start by making it obvious that I can set something where everyone passes or where everyone fails. That helps to shift the purpose of work to find out what you DON’T know or understand. The bits you get wrong are the ‘good’ bits because they are the useful bits.

Strategy 6: Adjusting grading to make sure mistakes aren’t detrimental

This is the tricky one (in the US). I’ve written about it here: Grading for Learning. Allowing corrections indicates that mistakes are about learning. I know. Some of them will ‘game’ that system. It’s a trade-off. Can we think about the long game, not just their time with us?

Strategy 7: Saying over and over again that mistakes are more than fine, they are welcome.

We don’t tend to get things the first time. Or even the second, or third. By the time you’ve said ‘it’s ok to make mistakes, it’s part of learning’ for the 27^th time… they may start to believe you.

And what have I missed? Plenty I’m sure! Please communicate via X: @helenrey, or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helen-reynolds-mbe/

Let’s get all these ideas together!