Make the mistake loudly!
I have joined pretty much ALL THE GROUPS for teaching- ok- not all, but it feels like that sometimes. Anyways I was recently reading through a thread and someone had posted how teachers need to quadruple check their spelling before they post anything in their classroom. There was some dissent saying it’s not necessary but a whole bunch of - “oh yes we are the teachers and it must be correct”. It was a week ago I saw this and it’s still bugging me. Yes, we want to check and re-check before we publish things as a practice and to show our students to do the same, BUT we are also human beings and mistakes are going to happen. So let’s own them, AND let’s also allow ourselves to be vulnerable learners in front of our students as well.
That second part isn’t so hard to do in the time of covid, as we are all learning on the fly; how to use tech, how to reach our different learners in a 2-D virtual way and making it be 3-D or feel 3-D, and just in general navigating logging into things and remembering all the darn passwords. What a gift for our students to see us, the professional, the teacher, struggle and persevere as we are learning. How amazing to have the role model right in front of them! And for us to admit, hey this is hard I don’t totally get this, or even, can someone here help me with this? Trust me it does not make you look like you are inept, it shows you are secure in not knowing everything, and any teacher who is hanging onto this idea that teachers are supposed to know everything needs to do a little reflection on who they are trying to help with that myth?
Back to mistakes, make them, own them, and learn from them. I’m not a fan of performative mistakes but to each their own. I love it though in the authentic mess up (although not always in the moment.) I have had to go the next day and say I totally did that wrong yesterday and here is why- it was a science concept I had very little knowledge of and what I did have was a bit of a misconception. The students left and I looked it all up again online to find additional resources to continue onwards tomorrow and I just thought- OH NO, I sent them away with my misconception in their heads. The next day I owned up to it, and we then explored the right way and had a chance to talk about misconceptions a bit and I got to add to our mistakes board with a reflective I used to think and now I know thinking routine. No damage was done, I’ve now openly shown that mistakes are totally okay as long as we reflect and learn and aren’t just being careless, and opened myself up to my class a bit more. How wonderful if by the end of the year the whole class could feel they could truly explore and be wrong about things in front of their peers without the fear of rejection and ridicule. While I know that isn’t a given from this practice it sure is a nice foundation to at least start to build that idea.
So back to the quadruple checking of spelling- if that’s you and your thing fine, but if you did mess it up don’t beat yourself up and listen to that voice saying you aren’t professional or doing enough, just own it and fix it out loud with your class. After all in my opinion, there is something better than perfection:)
