'How come they still make mistakes with the Super S!' 'Children are more and more hopeless these days -they don't learn! how can they still confuse which with who?!' they say in distress.
I could fill pages and pages with examples of phrases by exhausted teachers.
On the other hand, teachers, writers, parents, shrinks, theories, all, use phrases such as:
'Mistakes are the stepping stones to Wisdom.'
'We learn from trial and error.', which is absolutely true!!
But, now, teachers, in the classroom and when correcting papers or folders:
do we show our students that their mistakes are a stepping stone? or, rather, do we make them feel their mistakes are sinking rocks?
We all know of the effect of overcorrrecting, and of interrupting a student while he's speaking. Some of us have even been told not to correct in red... as if the colour really mattered.
The point I want to make here is that what matters is how we make the student feel about his mistakes.
More often than not, and in quiet sorrow, I observe that students take their own mistakes as a rising complex, or even something to be ashamed of!
From a holistic or systemic point of view, this is no more than a felony -may I say crime?- against our students' self-esteem and learning abilities.
If we want our students to learn, it is our duty to enhance their learning abilities, and even though we may choose to believe that their self-esteem is safely catered for at home, for sure there is a 'share' of their self-esteem which, I dare challenge, is on us: teachers and school altogether!
Hence, the importance of using mistakes as Stepping Stones!
It is the teacher's responsibility to use the students' mistakes as Stepping Stones.
When the teacher feels the mistakes made
by their students as personal offence, reacting to this 'personal offence
the student has committed towards his well-meaning teacher' – it is this
reaction that makes the student feel his mistake as a Sinking Rock.
This happens, and more often than we ourselves can
admit. It is a common reaction, not only in the classroom, but at home with our
own kids as well. It is automatic; rarely can we see it in ourselves or others.
And in those rare occasions where we do see it, we discard it either because we
don’t really know what to do about it, or because we see it as natural.
It has been one of my preoccupations for the last
years, as soon as I started noticing the effects some of our educational system
vices have on our kids.
During my search for answers and for better methods, I
have started to understand, comprehend and accept Holism as The theoretical background to enhance all of
our aspects as human beings.
Holism sees human being as a unique whole, interrelated
with its environment as well as with all its aspects within: physical-molecular, biological,
emotional, cognitive, and spiritual1. Moreover, Holism sees Pedagogy as a Human
Relationship, underlining the relational
aspect as the foundation of the interaction over the content. From a
holistic perspective, all these aspects are in constant interrelation. That is,
all modification produced at a cognitive level, just to give one example, will
have its effects on the emotional and biological levels. This is not taken into
consideration in a fragmentary pedagogy, thus producing educational instances
addressing only, for example, the cognitive aspect.
Among others, I can quote Ciompi2, who has
dealt with the relationship between feeling and thought, thus stating that emotions
produce organizing and integrating effects over cognition. In general terms,
emotions can work as triggers or as
inhibitors of certain thinking sequences; invariably decide the attentional
focus and its change; either open or close memories; define the mnemonic association
of cognitive elements; delimit the hierarchy of the contents of thought. Speaking
of the special effects of emotions, he says:
Pleasant feelings attract;
Feelings of interest attract –and serve
to the search of stimuli as to the psycho-physical alert and thus to the focus
of attention.
Feelings of fear or concern reject (thoughts), warning of the danger whether environmental,
cognitive or behavioural.
To sum up, the educator whose aim is to introduce or
modify behaviour, for example, must be aware that he is also influencing over
the student’s feelings and thoughts, in his physical, biological, emotional,
mental and spiritual aspects.
For this reason, the attitude with which we, teachers, approach our students' mistakes and errors is crucial to their learning process, self-esteem and thus, learning ability.
For this reason, the attitude with which we, teachers, approach our students' mistakes and errors is crucial to their learning process, self-esteem and thus, learning ability.
Now, what is a mistake?
As I see it, a mistake shows that our student is trying, that he's taking a risk. And this is what we must always bear in mind. Of course, there are various types of mistakes and of errors. Some of these do in fact show a student's careless attitude -but... which is the chicken and which is the hen in this situation?
Then, there are errors - systematic mistakes, which obviously show that the student has at some point misunderstood or mis-acquired a language unit. There are mistakes that can be considered slips of the pen, or slips of the tongue. And, there are mistakes that show that the student's learning is in process.
Let alone, in my experience, some mistakes are made by our students simply because they're risking something, by making a transfer out of a grammar rule they know. Most of the times, especially with secondary-school aged students, we assume our students' range of vocabulary, for example, is much wider than it really is.
To round up, I believe that a slight, subtle change in the teachers' feeling towards mistakes can have an ever-lasting effect! Using mistakes as Stepping Stones is the best way to help our students learn in an amicable, warm atmosphere.
1 Dr Carlos
Wernike, Fragmentos de “Castigo y Pedagogía”, Carlos G.Wernicke: Publicado
en Cuadernos Pestalozzi 2000 Vol II n°3 Fundación
Holismo de Educación, Salud y Acción Social
2 Luc Ciompi Profesor emérito.
Director de formación en Psiquiatría Social del Hospital Clínico Universitario,
Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de Berna (Suiza). http://scielo.isciii.es/scielo.php?pid=S0211-57352007000200013&script=sci_arttext
