Learning From Mistakes

“Our ability to manage and learn from mistakes is not fixed,” writes Eduardo Briceno on the Mindshift website. “We can improve it.

...An appreciation of mistakes helps us overcome our fear of making them, enabling us to take risks. But we also want…to understand what kinds of mistakes are most useful and how to most learn from them.” Briceno describes four kinds of mistakes people tend to make. One of them he terms “the stretch mistake.” As he explains:

“Stretch mistakes happen when we're working to expand our current abilities. We're not trying to make these mistakes in that we're not trying to do something incorrectly, but instead, we're trying to do something that is beyond what we already can do without help, so we're bound to make some errors. Stretch mistakes are positive. If we never made stretch mistakes, it would mean that we never truly challenged ourselves to learn new knowledge or skills.”

Ann Pelo, in an Out of the Box Training Kit, "Finding the Questions Worth Asking", writes about how to help children think about their learning (including how to learn from mistakes):

"Rather than using questions to lead a child to a particular revelation, or to direct a child’s thinking towards content knowledge that we’ve determined has merit, we ought to ask questions that are useful for the child’s course of exploration – which is to say, for the child’s development as a thinker. This is what we mean when we talk about the co-construction of knowledge: thinking about thinking in order to analyze and refine hypotheses."

Source: “Why Understanding These Four Types of Mistakes Can Help Us Learn,” by Eduardo Briceno, November 23, 2015

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