Maths Mistakes

Today we had a great discussion about mistakes and how we feel about them. Recent research by many neurologists and educationalists such as Jo Boaler from Yale University have found that every time you make a mistake, you brain actually learns. It even learns and develops when you don't know you've made a mistake. If you know you have made a mistake and work on correcting it, the synapses and connections in your brain really start firing and that's when real learning takes place.

In class we discussed how we feel about mistakes and why we don't like other people knowing when we make a mistake. I explained about the latest research and the students decided that perhaps we shouldn't call them mistakes but instead call them 'learning'.

If a child gets 10 out of 10 in a maths session and doesn't really struggle with the answers then they probably haven't learned much that day. Making errors and struggling to get the answer means you've done some learning and made progress. This message was important for the students and they really seemed to understand it.

In fact I had students asking if they could show their 'learning' to the class - which actually meant they wanted to show their mistakes.  Several students talked through their learning and the mistakes quite happily. I asked how they felt about sharing 'mistakes' and one student said "Before today I would have been scared and embarrassed, but now it feels good. "

 


The attitude towards mistakes had gone from embarrassment to excitement to show their learning. We also watched the short video below and discussed what sort of learning the people in it had to do.