The Biggest Mistake in School

For a place that is supposed to be about education and learning, school is awfully negative when it comes to mistakes. I just don’t get that. How can you learn without making mistakes and how can you not make mistakes when you are learning something new?

We’ve all heard the old adage “You learn from your mistakes.” Yet when it comes to school, they keep making the same mistake over and over by treating mistakes as reasons to cast blame on the students’ performance. “You need to be more careful . . .;” “If you had paid attention in class . . .;” “If only you had studied . . .” Every time a teacher (or a parent) says this, they are negating the learning process. Do they really have so much faith in the system that mistakes can only be character flaws in the students?

It wasn’t until years after the ink dried on my high school diploma that I began to really understand that mistakes are nothing more than an inevitable, natural and valuable part of the learning process. And that more than anything else, it is our mistakes that show us where we need to focus our efforts. I find it strangely ironic that the place we all go to learn doesn’t teach us how to learn.

Learning is a complicated process all by itself; within the context of school, there are many variables affect the process both positively and negatively. But when teachers turn a blind eye to the value of mistakes not only are they missing incredible teaching moments, but they are also shutting down the process by fostering a fear of failure in their students.

The physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as “a person who has made all the mistakes can be made in a very narrow field.” . . . Mistakes aren’t things to be discouraged. On the contrary, they should be cultivated and carefully investigated.
Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford, has spent decades demonstrating that one of the crucial ingredients of successful education is the ability to learn from mistakes. . . . Unfortunately, children are often taught the exact opposite. Instead of praising kids for trying hard, teachers [and parents], typically praise them for their innate intelligence (being smart). Dweck has shown that this type of encouragement actually backfires since it leads students to see mistakes as signs of stupidity and not as the building blocks of knowledge. The regrettable outcome is that kids never learn how to learn.
Dweck’s most famous study was conducted in twelve different New York City schools and involved more than four hundred fifth-graders. One at a time, the kids were removed from class and given a relatively easy test consisting of nonverbal puzzles. After the child finished the test, the researchers told the student his or her score and provided a single sentence of praise. Half of the kids were praised for their intelligence. . . . The other students were praised for their effort . . .
The students were then allowed to choose between two different subsequent tests. The first choice was described as a more difficult set of puzzles, but the kids were told that they’d learn a lot from attempting it. The other option was an easy test, similar to the test they had just taken.
When Dweck was designing the experiment, she’d expected the different forms of praise to have a rather modest effect. After all, it was just one sentence. But it soon became clear that the type of compliment given to the fifth-graders dramatically influenced their choice of tests. Of the group of kids that had been praised for their efforts, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. However, of the kids that were praised for their intelligence, most went for the easier test. “When we praise children for their intelligence,” Dweck wrote, “we tell them that this is name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.”
Dweck’s next set of experiments showed how this fear of failure actually inhibited learning. She gave the same fifth-graders yet another test. This test was designed to be extremely difficult . . . but Dweck wanted to see how the kids would respond to the challenge. The students who had been praised for their efforts in the initial test worked hard at figuring out the puzzles. “They got very involved,” Dweck says. “Many of them remarked, unprovoked, ‘This is my favorite test.’” Kids that had initially been praised for their smarts, on the other hand, were easily discouraged. Their inevitable mistakes were seen as sign of failure: perhaps they weren’t smart after all. After taking this difficult test, the two groups of students had to choose between looking at the exams of kids who did worse than them and looking at the exams of those who did better. Students praised for their intelligence almost always chose to bolster their self-esteem by comparing themselves with the students who had performed worse on the test. In contrast, kids praised for their hard work were more interested in the higher-scoring exams. They wanted to understand their mistakes, to learn from their errors, to figure out how to do better.
The final round of tests was the same difficulty level as the initial test. Nevertheless, students who’d been praised for their efforts exhibited significant improvement, raising their average score by 30 percent. Because these kids were willing to challenge themselves, even if it meant failing at first, they ended up performing at a higher level. This result was even more impressive when compared with students who’d been randomly assigned to the “smart” group; they saw their score drop by an average of nearly 20 percent. The experience of failure had been so discouraging for the “smart” kids that they actually regressed.
The problem with praising kids for their innate intelligence – the “smart” compliment – is that it misrepresents the neural reality of education. It encourages kids to avoid the most useful kind of learning activities, which is learning from mistakes. . . . Before your neurons can succeed, they must repeatedly fail. There are no shortcuts for this painstaking process. – How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer

Unfortunately my daughter has been made to feel bad about her mistakes so often and for long in school, that outside of school it’s sometimes hard to get her to look at and think about her mistakes so that she can learn from them and progress further. Thanks to this scholastic negativity her self-worth is tied to performing her sport perfectly. If she makes a mistake or has a tough time during a competition right away it’s, “I suck at this. Why am I even doing this?”

Thankfully, she has found enough support from others involved in the sport that she is actually starting to see the value of her mistakes and isn’t as afraid to get out there and try different things to improve her ability. She’s starting to understand that learning and improving at something takes time and effort; that hard work pays off in small amounts; and that being good at something doesn’t equal getting it absolutely right every single time. She is also starting to see that when it comes to schoolwork the only thing wrong with mistakes is her teachers’ negative view of them.

I wonder if school will ever wise up and learn from their own mistakes?

Namaste