It's like we are conditioned to try to not make a mistake.
When in reality, mistakes are how we learn.
We have all made mistakes.
And we all will continue to make mistakes.
For. As. Long. As. We. Live.
So instead of looking at mistakes as an embarrassment, something to avoid, or something that makes us want to stop altogether,
We need to understand mistakes.
And that's what we did today as we started class.
Students were to write how they felt when they goofed up, made a mistake, or failed at something on one side of the paper.
After our thoughts were down on paper, I had the students crumple the paper up, signifying that how we once thought of mistakes should just be thrown away.
I had them uncrumple the paper to show all the crinkles.
We had a very mini lesson on brain research and how when a mistake is made, it actually creates a synapse, strengthening neural pathways in the learning process.
Students then traced the creases to illustrate how synapses are created when we goof up.
As part of our ISN (Interactive Student Notebook), the right hand side of the notebook is for student output (think guided practice, reflection, questions, to do's, etc). Today, they were to respond to the statement, "How I will look at mistakes from this point forward." It will take some time to retrain our brain, we will make mistakes as we fall back into old habits, but my hope is at the end we find ourselves embracing mistakes as part of the learning process!
