Teacher Tip Tuesday — 18 Oct 2010

The Importance of Being in Error

So much of our teaching life is focused on getting students to get the right answers that it’s all to easy to ignore the importance of mistakes.

One thing that was rarely—if ever—stressed in my teacher training was self-reflection. How’d the lesson go today? What went right? What went wrong? What surprised you? How did the kids respond? Is that what you expected? Why? And the all-important: and what are you going to do to make it better next time?

Learning to look at our own practice through a critical (not judgmental) lens is what will make or break us as a teacher. Or at least it will determine whether we’ll become great at our chosen profession or just coast along, punching a clock (and cheating kids out of a quality education). However, learning to look at our students mistakes through a diagnostic (not judgmental) lens is what will guarantee everyone success, giving clues to both our needs and theirs.

Think like House, M.D.

Obviously, I don’t mean we should strive to be a curmudgeon, or in pain, or even devastatingly hot like Hugh Laurie. Instead, we need to think like a diagnostician. Once you know it’s not Lupus, you still have some work to do.

Let me tell you a story.

One day I had the chance to observe high school classes in a very large urban district on the East Coast. I met a lot of teachers whom I liked quite a lot personally, but I couldn’t quite figure out what was going on in their heads with the whole teaching thing. At the start of one class, a particular teacher explained what the students would be reading later in the class then informed them that first they were going to look “at the etymology of some of the vocabulary words.”

The disaffected boy next to me, slouching in his chair, arms folded asked, “Why we gonna study bugs?”

This was a ninth grade class at a huge inner-city school and some kid knew the word entomology?! You’re kidding, right? That’s a BRILLIANT mistake to make. Who has a vocabulary like that in ninth grade???

I completely expected to see the teacher dive on this kid, realizing that he was way smarter than he led anyone to believe and clearly just needed a little recognition and she’d have him in the palm of her hand for the rest of the year. Right?

Wrong.

Instead the teacher appeared irked (he hadn’t raised his hand), looked down her nose and said, ‘No. WORDS. We’re studying WORDS.”

Now, I don’t know if the teacher didn’t know the difference between etymology and entomology or if she just didn’t know how to recognize a genius mistake. Regardless, she lost that student. He wasn’t going to trust her. Ever again. It was over for them before the year even got started.

WWDHD?—What would Doctor House Do?

House may be a jerk (okay, he’s totally a jerk) but he knows enough to know when he’s wrong and when someone has given him a clue to a larger problem. If the problem is “this kid isn’t learning,” then the clues you need to find are “where is the disconnect? What preconceptions are getting in the way of learning?” for a start.

Kid’s aren’t stupid. We know that. They learn conditionally (If I do this I get that response) and they learn directly (4×6=24)—though there’s obvious overlap (if I learn and remember that 4×6=24, my parents will be happy) and, of course, there are more variations than only these.

But what if a kid misunderstands some simple element, some kernel of knowledge that we assume they have. How can that impact the rest of their education if neither direct instruction or conditional teaching can overcome this mystery gap?

How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition has many examples of why we all must be House in our educational practice. One that stuck with me is of children who consistently failed to demonstrate understanding that the earth was, in fact, a globe. The earth in their drawing was always a pancake, sometimes a pancake wrapped around a globe, but never what we know it to be. The kids understood that the Earth was round, yet they continued to fail.

Notice that she said round, not spherical.

Round is a circle. On a paper. And is two dimensional. A circular pancake.

The kids weren’t stupid. They knew the world was round. They hadn’t failed to learn. They’d just missed a piece—a small but vital piece—of the whole geometry of the earth concept.

If It Isn’t Right Then It Must Be…Close?

Next time you ask a question in class and students give you incorrect answers think fast and see if you can figure out why they answered as they did. If it’s close, let them know that you see their process. Show them where their thinking went awry. Help them to see that a wrong answer isn’t a hanging offense, but proof that they’re thinking! Next time you ask a question they’ll be more likely to offer an answer.

And maybe they’ll even learn something.