Learning to Err

A few encouraging anecdotes, that have the extra advantage of being true:

1. A science teacher stands in front of a fifth grade class, and discusses the use of different materials. One of the students suggests using tin for building airplanes, and insists the teacher said that in the previous lesson. After trying to convince the student for a few seconds that she didn't say it, the teacher changes her method and says: "Ok, so I made a mistake having said that tin is good for making airplanes, now please correct me."

2. As part of a one-upmanship campaign, a young engineer jabs a more experienced engineer with a reference to an mistake the senior engineer made. The experienced one acknowledges the error and goes ahead discussing the right way to do things, without even noticing the jab.

3. In a “lessons learned” session, there was a debate about whether some type of activity was done well. Some of the participants say the activity was fine. One of the participants stands up and explains, without any apparent self-consciousness, how he did things wrong and what damage it caused, in order to make sure everybody understands the way things were done was wrong, and to make sure the next time a different method will be used.

Now back to the norm:

I am told by educators that kids these days are very worried about making mistakes, and about being wrong. This is not a great surprise: In polite circles of society, “criticism” is synonymous with “attack.” This implies that making mistakes is unacceptable, and people should adopt a don’t-ask policy about it. Enlightened grown-ups try to shelter children from the possibility of seeing a mistake they made, for fear it will damage the child's self-esteem. It is now considered wrong even to point out a child's spelling mistakes, lest the child becomes self-conscious. I suspect the effect of this sheltering is the opposite of building up self-esteem: There is a message here that we can't deal with mistakes. The possibility of an error becomes more frightening, and the fear of making a mistake has a paralysing effect. If I don't do anything, I don't have a chance for errors, right? If I don't try, I won't fail. Fear of making mistakes is a major impediment to learning.

Another effect, in the cases we manage to disconnect the kids from a sense of having erred, is of diminishing the sense that we can do something well or poorly (What is the politically correct term for "poorly"? "differently well"?) We end up with kids, university students, and adults who are not in the habit of making an effort to tackle something difficult where they may fail, but are likely to improve themselves in the process - this is a complaint I hear from some university teachers. Some of them (by my own observation - not a proper research) have very little sense of quality. For example, they do write with spelling mistakes, but they don't know it.

The teacher in anecdote 1 above, by admitting a mistake, showed the students that it's ok to make mistakes; that they should examine critically information given to them; and probably a few more lessons about self assurance, integrity and such. Who cares she never really did say tin was a good material for airplanes.

Here's a semi-wild idea: It may be useful to actively create opportunities for such teaching. A teacher can occasionally make an intentional mistake, admit the mistake, and let the students correct it. Later, the teacher can simulate a mistake, and let the students realize it on their own.

While we are at it, here is a fully wild idea: It may be useful to build opportunities to make mistakes into the normal course of learning. By giving a class an assignment that has a catch in it, and letting everybody get it wrong. They can all feel secure in the fact that they all made a mistake, so nobody is a fool, and nobody can be the subject of the dreaded criticism. At a higher level, the teacher can give a few exercises, in each of which, about half the class will fail. This will give most of the students an opportunity to be on both sides of the divide. When students are part of the mistaking half, it can increase their ability to deal with their own failure, since it is more difficult to be in a smaller group that made a mistake, than to be part of a whole class that did. When students are on the half that did the right thing, the repeating exercise can reduce the tendency to gloat and to belittle others, since the same students made mistakes just a while ago, and are probably going to make mistakes pretty soon. More advanced erring exercises can let just a small group make the error, or even just an individual. This practice is reminiscent of the cultural engineering exercises in Skinner's Walden two, which is good company.

But even with the tamer methods, if we have more teachers like the one in anecdote 1 above, we may end up with more adults like those in anecdotes 2 and 3: People who think that errors are inevitable when doing anything, and that the natural thing to do with a mistake is not to hide it, but learn from it and let others learn from it.

One more thoughts:

At the extreme end of a Mistake, there is Failure; and about that Winston Churchill once said: "Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm."