I think culture plays a very important role in learning. One of the first things I do when teaching (school or sports) a new group of kids is to encourage them to make mistakes and how to handle them. A couple of phrases I use are:
- If you aren't making mistakes, you aren't trying hard enough.
- Congratulations you made a mistake, now what can we learn from it?
- Learn from the mistakes of others, you don't have enough time to make them all yourself.
I also tend to model mistake making (sometimes intentionally :)
In dealing mistakes I use the bathroom analogy (stolen from
PCA,
nytimes article here on flushing mistakes and filling their emotional tanks, which is equally important).
Another point in slate article Karl shared is this, when talking about the test quesiton:
"if the question was such that everyone got the right answer, then it wouldn’t be a good question."
I recall Ken Blanchard talking about giving the kids the answers to the final exam and all the other teachers and his chairman getting upset. His comment was he wanted ALL the kids to succeed (and learn). There is definitely something wrong with a culture that focuses more on identifying the select few than helping all to succeed.
All that said, my mind being full of contradictions and having heard objections to the above approaches...
I have a hard time imaging my boss coming to me and saying "Congratulations Steve you made another mistake!!!". Yet I can imagine and have heard her say "You did your best, under similar circumstances and pressures I would have done the same thing, move on and lets get it right." The above approaches do focus on learning and doing your best. But I believe they do so in a way that encourages more kids to succeed and be happy. More on how to do that in a future blog post.