Practice: Error management

Practice: Error management

Hello mistakes

There wasn't human being who would manage to live his life without any errors or mistakes made. It seams to be a quality of human race. My first connotation to word "error" are negative feelings like fear and uncertainty. Therefore one of my main beliefs is that we learn best from our experience, which is mistakes mainly.

In my opinion this is one of the most tricky topic of all. The conclusion from the paragraph above is we shouldn't be shared of mistakes but welcome them and treat them as another opportunity to learn and grow.

My practice school

Mistakes in schools are not welcomed, generally. Institution and grading system which gives higher grades for making less mistakes has clear attitude towards theme. I think student naturally learn from the world around them. If they get bad grade and negative comments from the teacher and the parents after making a mistake they'll avoid them and be stressed every time they do something wrong.

In my practice school it looks the same as in typical other school. But, as usually, teacher is the person who can change the way things are in the school environment even if they don't have the power of the principle.

What to do

The history teacher I mentioned in previous posts is an example again. One of her repetitive lesson practice is polling students at the beginning of the lesson. But she is the master here. Students are not stressed on this part of the lesson, they generally feel safe. On one lesson I observed the student who was being polled knew nothing at all as he was absent last time and didn't catch up with the material. Even then he did his best, but didn't get any answer correctly. Reaction of the teacher was simple and natural: she looked a little disappointed and sad but she immediately asked the boy if he want to try again on the next lesson. He agreed and all was clear. I was truly shocked after those events. My student's experience with polling is full of stress and crying. Here the boy made mistake, he didn't catch up and knew what to do. Maybe what was helpful was his personality and attitude but still, I can see great impact of the teacher's behavior.

What not to do

The other day of observation showed me how the teacher shouldn't behave when it comes to dealing with mistakes and errors. It was usual math lesson. Students were given a worksheet and worked individually. They had a lot of questions. Similar situation happened few times: a student raised his hand, teacher came, student asked a question, teacher answered by pointing out the mistake, student tried to correct it by himself. I didn't like the mechanism especially while observing the consequences. Kids were frustrated and mainly lost after asking the questions. They made a mistake and didn't actually know what they did wrong and how to correct it. Teacher's attitude wasn't very supportive.

One more behavior of the teacher draw my attention. Sometimes after being asked a question which she found silly she tend to show it to the student. Either she made o pause while answering that said "you should know this" or even give a comment to shame the student in front of the others. I found it very rude and not supportive at all. Even I felt that making a mistake in front of this teacher is very dangerous and it's better not to try than try and make a mistake.

For the future

I'd like to observe how the teachers deal with talking about the tests and mistakes made there. This is very fragile issue as every student is different, some may be extremely sensible. I'd like to learn how to talk about mistakes, starting with the attitude of accepting them.