If a learner believes intelligence, talent and ability are fixed, then they may be more inclined to perceive mistakes and failure in a negative light.
This, in turn, may make them less inclined to persist when things get challenging – because persisting involves making mistakes, failing, and trying again in spite of this.
When promoting growth mindsets, we want to change how learners perceive mistakes and failure.
By doing this, we seek to alter the perceptions that underpin how they think about learning, and about themselves as learners.
Our aim is to help learners see mistakes as a useful part of the learning process.
This might result in them perceiving mistakes as a good thing (because of the information to which they give rise) or in a neutral light (as an inevitable part of all learning).
But it will almost always lead us to dispel, or at least minimise, any negativity they might associate with mistake-making, as well as the costs they perceive as being attached to failure.
The rationale behind a positive view of mistakes is simple: When learning something new, it is to be expected that we will make mistakes.
The mistakes we make give us access to information.
We can use this information to change what we do and how we think.
Or, to put it another way, to help us learn.
A child who goes through school without ever making a mistake will not have learned as much as they could have done.
Nor will their thinking have been sufficiently challenged.
Failure sits alongside mistake-making.
When learners fail, they find themselves in a situation where they need to persist if they want to move forwards.
Part of this persistence must involve putting the emotional experience of failure to one side and looking objectively at what has happened and why.
They can then use this information to improve, helping them to succeed where once they came up short.
The principles are the same.
Failure happens. It’s an inevitable (natural) part of the learning process. It’s no big deal.
By looking at why we failed we gain information we can use when we try again.
By trying again, we get closer to being successful … and so on.
Changing how learners think about mistakes and failure can help them to develop a growth mindset.
The central tenet of a growth mindset is that intelligence, talent and ability are open to change.
If we believe this, we are more likely to see mistakes and failure as part of how we learn, rather than a signal that we should give up, or a threat to be avoided.
Shifting learner attitudes around mistakes and failure is often an effective way to shift their overall mindsets, leading to good results all round.
So, let’s have a look at a couple of techniques any teacher can use to work on this, and to promote growth mindsets in the process.
Mistake Quotas
Consider this set of instructions, that a teacher could display at the start of their lesson:
- ‘In this lesson I expect you to make a minimum of 3 mistakes. If you get half-way through and haven’t made any mistakes, you need to ask me to make the work more challenging for you. At the end of the lesson, we will spend five minutes reflecting on what we learned from our mistakes and deciding whether the lesson was sufficiently challenging.’
This is a mistake quota.
The teacher is giving learners a license to make mistakes.
Mistakes are being actively encouraged.
(You could swap ‘mistake’ for ‘get stuck’ and call it a ‘stuck quota’, if you prefer.)
The explicit message is that all learners need to make mistakes during the lesson.
The implicit message is that mistakes are a good thing – something the teacher wants to see.
Using this technique regularly means habituating learners into a way of working in which mistakes are seen as desirable and useful.
It also draws the link between making mistakes and having your thinking challenged.
Learners are expressly told that there is an important relationship between these two things.
The message is clear: mistakes are one of the indicators that the work set by the teacher is at the right level.
You can adapt the technique by focussing on individual activities instead of the whole lesson.
For example:
- ‘While writing your essay I expect you to make at least three significant changes, based on what you feel you haven’t got right first time round. When you’ve finished your essay, write me a note explaining where you made mistakes and how you improved on your first attempt.’
Here we have a significant task (writing an essay) with a mistake quota added in.
This influences how learners approach the task, what they do during the task, and how they perceive mistake-making throughout.
One important point to note is that you may need to define what mistakes look like when using this technique.
So, for example, in the essay writing just mentioned, we might tell our class to focus on major mistakes such as lack of clarity, incorrect use of key vocabulary, and limited evaluation, rather than on minor issues like spelling mistakes.
(These still matter. It’s just they are more like careless mistakes than useful mistakes caused by high challenge, so they give learners less opportunity to learn.)
The point is to ensure learners are attending to mistakes that matter more in the wider context of their learning – and which you want them to focus on.
A brief explanation when introducing the quota, allied to some modelling, is nearly always sufficient to achieve this.
Mistake Rehearsal
Here’s our second technique.
Another way you can help change learner perceptions of mistakes and failure.
The great advantage of rehearsal is that when the time proper comes around you already know what you need to do.
When it comes to making mistakes, we can teach learners how to respond by taking them through a process of rehearsal.
This lets them reap the benefits of rehearsal in the context of mistake-making.
As teachers we are experienced in responding to mistakes, whether that’s in relation to teaching or in relation to learning.
Our learners, however, are not so experienced.
Mistake rehearsal is all about closing the gap.
You can go about this in lots of ways. Here are five examples.
Example 1
Plan an activity that is so challenging that all learners will make mistakes.
Then lead learners in a reflection on what happened, why it happened, and the different responses it elicited in the class.
You and your learners can rank these responses from most to least useful, creating a toolkit of good responses that everyone can practice applying in the future.
Example 2
Model examples of how to respond positively to mistakes.
For example, learners are doing PE.
It’s the first time they’ve done long jump.
The teacher begins by flagging up some common mistakes learners might make:
- Running up too fast
- Overstepping the board
- Pulling out of the jump
They talk through how they would respond to these if they made them.
This gives learners a model they can use when they start practising their long jumps.
One that is all about responding positively to mistakes.
Example 3
Model examples of general or subject-specific problem-solving strategies before giving learners an opportunity to practice using these.
For example, an English teacher might model an approach to rewriting sentences that don’t make sense.
Learners can then apply this technique whenever they make a similar mistake.
Initially, you might need to prompt learners about when to use the technique.
However, they will soon get the hang of things and should be able to use the technique without your involvement.
This approach gives learners a positive way to look at mistakes they make, and to learn from them.
Example 4
Set learners the task of creating a decision tree showing what they will do when faced with a mistake.
For example, a history teacher might ask learners to create decision trees showing how to respond to a series of specific mistakes – such as running out of time in an exam, overlooking a key point in an argument, or incorrectly analysing a source.
The challenge comes when learners actually make one of these mistakes.
Will they use their decision tree?
(You might need to remind them.)
Example 5
Ask learners to predict what mistakes they think they might make and to then suggest how they could respond positively to these.
Examples of positive responses include things like:
- Trying a different strategy
- Sharing your mistake with a partner and asking what they think
- Looking back through your book to see if you can find anything that might help you
- Asking for help
- Re-reading the task or question
