How to create a mistake-friendly classroom?

Introduction

Mistakes are an integral part of our lives. Without mistakes, we cannot learn anything. It is the blunders that draw lessons for us and encourage us to not repeat them again in our lives. As students, we tend to make a lot of mistakes, be they subjective or behavioral, and the best part of this is that we have many teachers, seniors, friends, and of course, our parents to correct it for us. As we proceed to higher classes, there is nobody to do that for us. Sometimes when we make a mistake, the whole class makes fun of us, even the teachers scold us for doing so. In such a case we feel discouraged, and hesitate to ask and clear our doubts in the next class, which again is a huge setback to our understanding. It is impossible to not make mistakes. Time and again we will do so, but to repeat a mistake is a sign of foolishness, it is better to make new mistakes so that we get to learn new lessons from them. There’s no living being existing on this planet who has led a faultless, perfect life. Never flinch to make blunders. Make mistakes, learn from them, use your lessons in the next task that you will be doing later.

Importance of Mistakes

1. Mistakes move us to understand better. Initially, it’s is the fear of failure that discourages us from accepting and facing mistakes. It is the outcome of making mistakes, that is, societal judgments, that inhibit us to accept the fact that we made a mistake. But when the curtain falls, we are open to receiving feedback. It is extremely important to understand where we went wrong. Mistakes will knock you off of the rigid axis, exempting you from the delusion that what you did was the only way to do a thing. You land in an environment of teachability, by broadening your perspective and annihilating your ego. You become receptive to experiences, yet another crucial ingredient for success.
2. Mistakes will allow beneficial self-compassion. Self-compassion is the key to keeping yourself motivated and enthusiastic. It allows you to keep progressing toward your goals. Scientific analysis has shown that self-compassion or compassionate acknowledgment of our mistakes enhances our passion and determination to move forward toward our objectives. A bit of kindness enables you to draw the best out of a situation.
3. Mistakes will allow you to thwart fears and take more positive risks in your life. When we entertain fearful thoughts, we allow those thoughts to have your attention and energy, which certainly is not an intelligent investment of our energy. In such a case the best decision that we can make is to not let fears and anxieties consume our intellectual fuel. If you make more mistakes, you dare to spend your energy to learn lessons, which is a fair deal. If you are willing to take risks and make more mistakes, it’s a win-win situation. You will get to learn more lessons and you will gain the confidence to take a step further and see what lies ahead. It takes a lot of courage to do so.
4. Mistakes will reboot your enthusiasm. After making enough blunders you will feel motivated to have learned lessons. Initially, the disappointment of not being up to the mark, the best in the room will haunt you, but come on, aren’t errors a part of the entire circus we are playing our roles in? Make mistakes for the sake of motivation, but never hesitate. Mistakes are the best way to upgrade your morale. You are here to help you and not to stay dainty and nerdy in the views of people.
5. To transform and upgrade from an improvement mindset to an expansion mindset, you should make mistakes. Mistakes not only help in the improvement but also broaden our views. For example, you made a mistake, you will be sad for some time, and later when you’ll become normal, you will reflect on where you went wrong, then you will try to improve and take lessons from your past mistake, at the same time, you will also get a wider picture of the entire story, thus helping you in developing an expansion mindset. When you widen your perspective, you will come out of the small impression of success as honing a skill to perfection to an enlarged outlook to see success as realization, actualization, and fulfillment.
6. Mistakes will remind you of being a part of a grand experiment. Aren’t we all a part of the grand experiment of life? Each day provides us with an apparatus to run experimental choices, to become the alchemist of our lives by learning and discovering to fix the past blunders.

How to create a mistake-friendly environment?

1. Encourage students to make mistakes and discover paths they are not supposed to take. To reach your destination, you must also know what not to do, and mistakes allow that to happen. Encouragement to make mistakes will lead to increased and better student-teacher interaction. This will also help in deeper and better understanding.
2. Motivate students to draw lessons from their mistakes and share them in the classroom. When students speak about their experiences they’ll encourage their peers and themselves to experiment more, thus enhancing their success as well. Lessons and experiences allow students to face challenges and see drawbacks as opportunities for improvement and not incentivize their efforts for just good grades.
3. Mistake friendly environment will become a guide for the subject teacher too. Focus more on helping students and teachers with a guide, and what could be a better guide than mistakes themselves? To create an ecosystem of learning and committing mistakes, make students look at mistakes as an ultimate guide to accomplish their objectives.
4. Timely feedback to reflect on the mistakes will enable students to make more mistakes so that they can draw lessons from them. Allowing students to narrate their learning experiences in a story, will also help them and others to learn effectively.

Mistakes are an essential part of life, repeating them will bring no productivity and growth to you, but making a new mistake will definitely award you with tons of lessons and amazing experiences.

Also read: Online Classes vs. Traditional Classroom Learning

Frequently Asked Questions

Que 1: If a person never makes a mistake, does that mean that person has not learned anything in life?

Ans 1: Not exactly. There is a fair chance of that person learning from other people’s mistakes. Maybe he makes a plan, thinks about it critically, and removes any possible chance of things going wrong. Maybe he has learned something by thinking about a lot of things. To say that that person has not learned anything would be incorrect because there is something that he or she must be doing to complete a task flawlessly.

Que 2: How to avoid making mistakes?

Ans 2: That cannot be done practically, and if you want to do so, then study your next steps properly and critically. Otherwise the more you try to avoid making mistakes, the more likely you are to fall into the trap.

Ques 3. How to not repeat the same mistakes over and over again?

Ans 3: By learning lessons from them. If you are repeating the same mistakes, the chances are that you have not learned anything from them. Take a pause and think where you went wrong and note your lessons in a notebook. Next time, read them before proceeding on a different task.