November 2018 – dy/dan

Guillaume ParÃ©, in the very interesting comments of my last post where I urged us to reconsider mistakes:

I do agree with what is written, but I am still wondering what I’m supposed to do with that information and the student’s copy.

T: Oh this is so interesting! You’ve actually answered a different question correctly. Check this out:

T: How does that help you come up with an answer to the original question? Talk about it. I’ll be back.

That’s a script right there. It works for any incorrect answer. The script is all-purpose and all-weather but it has two challenging requirements:

You have to actually believe that student ideas are interesting,Â especially ones that don’t correctly answer the question you were trying to ask.
You have to identify the question the student answered correctly.

This is why I want to learn more math and more math and more math.

The more math I know, the more power I have not just to show off at parties but also to appreciate student ideas and to identify the different interesting questions they’re answering correctly.

Barbara Pearl, via email:

Can you write about it briefly again in a simpler way so I can try and understand it? When students make a mistake or answer something incorrectly, you want to …

I want to teach in a way that honors the specific student and also the general ways people learn.

So in any interaction with students, I need to a) understand the sense they’re making of mathematics, b) celebrate that sense, saying loudly “I see you making sense!”, and then c) help them develop that sense, connecting the question they answered correctly to a question they haven’t yet answered correctly.

Rachel, in the comments:

So, if we don’t call it a mistake, then what do we call it?

I don’t have any problem saying a student’s answer is incorrect, that they didn’t correctly answer the question I was trying to ask. But my favorite mathematical questions defy categories like “correct” and “incorrect” entirely:

So how would you describe the pattern?
What do you think will happen next?
Would a table, equation, or graph be more useful to you here?
How are you thinking about the question right now?
What extra information do you think would be helpful?

How can you call any answer to those questions a mistake or incorrect? What would that even mean? Those descriptions feel inadequate next to the complexity of the mathematical ideas contained in those answers, which I interpret as a signal that I’m asking questions that matter.

Featured Comment

Denise Gaskins quoting WW Sawyer:

Most remarks made by children consist of correct ideas very badly expressed. A good teacher will be very wary of saying ‘No, that’s wrong.’ Rather, he will try to discover the correct idea behind the inadequate expression. This is one of the most important principles in the whole of the art of teaching.

Daniel Peter:

“So, if we don’t call it a mistake, then what do we call it?”

THINKING

cheesemonkeysf:

I find that I have to keep insisting that they restate the question in their own words. The culture of “right answer” is filled with shame and shaming, and students will try repeatedly to just give me the “correct” answer to the original question. But this is a missed opportunity for developing understanding, in my view.

I’ve seen this particular incorrect answer from dozens of students over the last several weeks.

The work for 10 and 15 marbles is incorrect, but it isn’t a mistake. If I label it a mistake, even if I attach a growth mindset message to that label, I damage the student, myself, mathematics, and the relationships between us.

Mistakes are the difference between what I did and what I meant to Do.

For example, I know that words in the middle of a sentence generally aren’t capitalized. I meant to type “do” but I typed “Do.” That was a mistake.

What we’re seeing in the table above, by contrast, is students doing the thing they meant to do!

When I call that table a mistake, what I’m actually saying is that there’s a difference between what the student did and what I meant for the student to do. Instead of seeing the student’s work as a window into her developing ideas about tables and linear patterns, I see it as a mirror of my own thinking.

And it’s a bad mirror of my own thinking. It doesn’t reflect my thinking well at all!

It’s a bad mirror, so I call it a mistake. “Mistakes grow your brain,” I say. “We expect them, respect them, inspect them, and correct them here,” I say. And if we have to label student ideas “mistakes,” maybe those are good messages to attach to that label.

But the vast majority of the work we label “mistakes” is students doing exactly what they meant to do.

We just don’t understand what they meant to do.

Teaching effectively means I need to know what a student knows and what to ask or say to help her develop that knowledge. Calling her ideas a mistake transforms them from a window into her knowledge into a mirror of my own, and I am instantly less effective.

Our students offer us windows and we exchange them for mirrors.

The next time you see an answer that is incorrect, don’t remind yourself about the right way to talk about a mistake. It probably isn’t a mistake.

Ask yourself instead, “What question did this student answer correctly? What aspects of her thinking can I see through this window? Why would I want a mirror when this window is so much more interesting?”

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Month: November 2018

[Mailbag] What Do You Do with the Ideas You Used to Call “Mistakes”

That Isn’t a Mistake