Learning from student mistakes

There are implications, too, for our attitudes to failure in the classroom. If mistakes are essential to learning, to what extent do we design teaching to produce mistakes? Or do we instead stigmatize failure by sending students the message that we do not expect mistakes and that successful learning means notmaking errors?

One way to minimize mistakes is to assign tasks within students’ comfort zones. If tasks are relatively easy, failure is unlikely. But so too is learning. Successful learning is most likely when students are given challenges beyond their comfort zones – challenges that stretch and extend them to the point of making mistakes from which they can learn.

A first requirement then is a willingness to see mistakes not as something to be avoided, but as something to be embraced. This has implications for both teachers and students. Much teaching is focused on creating conditions for student success. But effective teaching often means providing opportunities for students to make mistakes and to learn. Students need to be assisted to welcome new challenges and to view mistakes not as reflections on their ability, but as vital steps in the learning process.

A second requirement is professional skill in analyzing the reasons for student mistakes. Student errors are often superficial indicators of underlying misunderstandings or inadequately developed skills. There is no point creating the conditions for failure if there is no intention to investigate causes and provide feedback to guide learning. Skills of investigation and diagnosis are crucial to effective teaching and essential prerequisites for learning from mistakes.

Discussion of findings

The twinned notions of care and responsibility frame our work in teacher education. In deliberating about how to educate prospective teachers who are imbued with these intersecting ideals, we have to design learning environments in which they encounter and engage with these in a tangible way. While most teacher education programmers may easily create opportunities for students to become part of a 'cognitive apprenticeship' in an educational socio-cultural 'community of practice' (Lave & Wenger 1991), we are concerned that students' enculturation into a 'caring apprenticeship' (Noddings 1992) is often neglected. In our view, the latter is only possible if students are encouraged to establish caring relationships in the course of their own learning. 

One way in which we promote this is through group work and the pedagogy of SL, through which students can learn that the concepts of care and responsibility are not to be studied in an objectified way; they are a way of being and doing. Here, we find useful the writings of Semetsky (2006:9) using Deleuze's conclusions about care theorists such as Noddings (1998:196). She proposes that (student) teachers 'become self-autonomous in the process of giving' and 'interdependence'. From this perspective, our teacher education students remain 'becoming' (in a Deleuzian sense), and find part of who they are becoming in the 'moral interdependence' of working as a team in their SL projects. Students, in groups, have to learn to become morally interdependent first with each other and then with the communities they serve. 

It is clear from students' reports that they initially struggle with learning how to 'serve' other members of their group. Across the three years, all students' descriptions and discourse reveal the difficulties they encounter with overcoming differing work ethics, ways of engagement and communication and working towards a goal that would benefit the community they are serving. In particular, it is clear that before students can begin to serve their community, they have to learn first how to serve each other by way of a caring pedagogy in interaction with group members. In addition, as a sense of care and community operate in conjunction with each other, relationships in the group have to reflect both. These relationships should be imbued, firstly, with trusting, emotional attachment, empathy and caring, and have embedded in them the discourses associated with learning to become part of a community, namely responsibility, fairness and justice. This integration is evident in the personal and professional learning expressed by students in this investigation.