Don't Prevent Students' Mistakes, Prepare for Them
It's common knowledge that people can learn as much from their mistakes as anything. And yet traditional teaching methods often deny students the chance to learn from their mistakes by preventing them from making mistakes. In social studies and science, for example, a lot of teachers tell students how to scale and label their axes when plotting data on a line graph. This prevents students from mistakenly assigning the dependent variable to the x-axis and the independent variable to the y-axis, or running out of room on their paper by going with ones or tens for their scales instead of hundreds or thousands.
Setting students up for success like this may seem like the right thing to do. After all, why let kids experience the frustration of botching something when you can prevent it? Here's why: such frustration is a precursor to deep, lasting learning. That's right, students' grasp of new concepts and skills is often better when they struggle through the process of learning those concepts and skills than when teachers error-proof that process.
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