The Four Stages of Loving Mistakes

In order for students to develop a capacity for learning from feedback, they must first be open to confronting their mistakes. In my classroom, assessment pass-back day used to be an emotional roller coaster. Some students are bouncing out of their seats and others are close to tears, awaiting the 'judgement' that was ahead.

Through thoughtful and patient instruction and practice with the four stages of learning to love mistakes, my students are becoming increasingly open to confronting their mistakes and using them to learn.

Normalizing mistakes involves the teacher helping to model an open curiosity towards mistakes.
Celebration involves finding peers who made similar mistakes and investigating together.
Analyzing mistakes involves finding patterns in our mistakes.
Generalizing mistakes involves extrapolating patterns to provide valuable insights for future learning.

Floop has developed a lesson plan, as part of our bigger Feedback Literacy curriculum, that will walk you through four activities that will help your students learn to love mistakes.

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