Getting it Wrong is Okay

By Mark

Scientific American recently posted an article with mild criticism of education's current focus on prizing right answers over thinking and learning processes.

While we educators know that repetition and practice is one path to learning, this article is a good reminder of something else we ought to be intentionally fostering in our students: thinking.

Learning from "failure" is important, as is learning from wrong answers. This may seem like a silly question, but its an important one in our present climate where snapshot high stakes tests and summative data form critical assessments of both student and teacher success: What do you do as an educator or parent to take advantage of "wrong answers" in order to help children learn to think?

Comments

[Mark]

I think some of it extends to parents, too, who want to know more about how to get extra credit to get grades up than anything else. But, the system is to blame for that unfortunately.

One of my colleagues does this cool thing called a "metacog log" based on the idea that metacognition...thinking about your thinking...is a key to better thinking. She teaches seniors, but I've used it with my freshmen too. Basically, when they get a test back with answers marked wrong, or when they get an essay with comments, they write about those comments. Specifically, they look for trends in their own misunderstanding and try to identify where their thinking went wrong. It's hard to explain here, but it's quite powerful. I've seen fewer kids making the same errors twice in writing as a result of this kind of reflection.

[Debby Kurti]

I see this all the time... students who want to know what they need to know for the test. They want to know what the "right" answer is and they lose sight of the process of learning. I more or less intentionally drive my students crazy because I am very process-oriented and will seldom (re: almost never) tell them the "right" answer. My major objective in all classes is to teach my students how to learn, how to find out what they need to know, and how to figure out what to do with what they find out. At the community college level, I get students who are indoctrinated for a dozen years to fill in bubbles. It's a tough battle!