# data[].attributes.body
Whether you instruct first grade or university students, take some time to think about where you are with creating a learning space where your students have ample voice, engage frequently with each other, and are given opportunities to make choices. When considering various teaching approaches, balance is the key word. Researchers Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe suggest educators reflect on the ways they balance the following three teaching roles:  Facilitation: Direct instruction: Coaching:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In the education world, the term student-centered classroom is one we hear a lot. And many educators would agree that when it comes to 21st-century learning, having a student-centered classroom is certainly a best practice.

Whether you instruct first grade or university students, take some time to think about where you are with creating a learning space where your students have ample voice, engage frequently with each other, and are given opportunities to make choices.

Guiding Questions

Use these questions to reflect on the learning environment you design for students:

In what ways do students feel respected, feel valued, and feel part of the whole group?

In what ways do students have ownership of the classroom? Do they ever make decisions about resources, environment, or use of time? When? How often?

Do they have ownership in their learning? Do they have choices and options for projects, assignments, and partners for group work?

When are students comfortable with expressing who they are and their thoughts and ideas? When are they not?

When do you inquire about the needs of your students? How often do you do this? How often do you check for group understanding and adjust the instruction accordingly?

How are desks arranged? Are students facing each other? Do they have multiple opportunities each week to share with fellow classmates, and to share with a variety of classmates?

As the instructor, what is my "air time" each class session? How much direct instruction is there? How might I change some of that directing teaching to facilitating? (Here's a post I wrote on this topic, How to Transform Direct Instruction.)

Balancing Teacher Roles

So let's talk about that last question, and specifically, direct instruction versus facilitation. When considering various teaching approaches, balance is the key word. If we turn to the work of educational researchers Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, and their seminal book, Understanding by Design (UbD), they suggest educators reflect on the ways they balance the following three teaching roles:

Facilitation: open-ended questioning, problem posing, Socratic seminar, and guided inquiry

Direct instruction: demonstration, modeling, and lecturing

Coaching: providing feedback, conferencing, and guided practice

How do you decide on how much of one role and not enough of another? Well, when designing learning for your students, keep this is mind: There needs to be a healthy balance between student construction of meaning and teacher guidance.

In other words, yes, you need to tell them stuff and show them how to do things, but you also need to let your learners discover, experiment, and practice even if they miss the mark or target. Educational research tell us time and time again that all learners (young or old) need time to muddle through and make meaning of new content, ideas, and concepts with some coaching and guidance, but also independently.

In the comments section below, share with us your ideas and practices for fostering a learning environment that is student centered.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Student Centered Is Your Classroom? | Edutopia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the education world, the term student-centered classroom is one we hear a lot. And many educators would agree that when it comes to 21st-century learning, having a student-centered classroom is certainly a best practice.

# data[].attributes.body
Changing your students' perspective on mistakes is the greatest gift you can give yourself as a teacher. Imagine having a classroom of students who are engaged and constantly improving -- it's every teacher's dream. Instead, teachers face too many students who are disengaged and really rather surly. That surliness is years in the making. By the time students walk into your classroom, they've likely already internalized their mistakes as evidence that they're just not smart.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For the last ten years, we've worked one-on-one with students from elementary school through graduate school. No matter their age, no matter the material, when you ask what they're struggling with, students almost universally name a subject: "math," "English" or, in some instances, "school." Doubting that all of school is the issue, we then ask to see their last test. After some grumbling, the student digs down, deep into the dark, dank recesses of his or her backpack, and pulls out a balled-up, lunch-stained paper that, once smoothed out, turns out to be the latest exam.

To a teacher, this should be incredibly frustrating. You spend a huge part of your life grading tests, commenting on essays, and providing thoughtful feedback on homework assignments . . . only to have them wadded up and ignored. (Yes, students look at their tests, but you shouldn't harbor any illusion that they look at anything but the red letter grade.) Before writing students off for being ungrateful or lazy, you need to understand why what they're doing makes perfect sense.

The Science Behind Mistakes

Telling students they need to take advantage of the feedback they get isn't just good advice -- it's established science. In the last few decades, researchers have discovered a lot about how people become experts. The main idea, made popular by everyone from author Malcolm Gladwell to rapper Macklemore, is the 10,000-hour rule. Ten thousand is the number of hours it takes to become an expert in almost any field. While it's wonderful that people are starting to understand how work leads to expertise, the most important part of that research is not how much practice someone needs to perform, but what kind of practice. This latter category is called deliberate practice and involves isolating what's not working and mastering the difficult area before moving on.

Picture a classical violinist rehearsing. He or she would not play a new piece start-to-finish, fudging through tricky sections and trying to "be done." That musician stops in trouble spots, figures them out, and then plays that measure over and over again, and only moves on when it's perfect. The same principle applies to schoolwork.

Mistakes are the most important thing that happens in any classroom, because they tell you where to focus that deliberate practice.

So why don't students view their mistakes as a valuable asset? Well, students don't think about their mistakes rationally -- they think about them emotionally. Mistakes make students feel stupid. "Stupid" is just that: a feeling. Specifically, it's the feeling of shame, and our natural response is to avoid its source. If we say something embarrassing, we hide our face. If we get a bad grade, we hide the test away. Unsurprisingly, that's the worst move to make if you ever want to get better. Academic success does not come from how smart or motivated students are. It comes from how they feel about their mistakes.

Changing your students' perspective on mistakes is the greatest gift you can give yourself as a teacher. Imagine having a classroom of students who are engaged and constantly improving -- it's every teacher's dream. Instead, teachers face too many students who are disengaged and really rather surly. That surliness is years in the making. By the time students walk into your classroom, they've likely already internalized their mistakes as evidence that they're just not smart. Getting a bad grade feels like a personal attack. No wonder they're giving the deliverer of those grades the stink eye.

A Fresh Take on Mistakes

To help your students rethink mistakes, help them be specific about their errors. Knowing that answer #3 is wrong doesn't mean much. Knowing that they didn't understand mitosis gives them a mandate for getting better. Often, when we go through tests with students, the mistakes they perceive as dire are either careless errors or a single concept applied incorrectly on several questions. Either way, the "fix" is usually smaller than how big the problem feels.

You can also help students view their mistakes as helpful. The red pen isn't the enemy -- when students understand how to deal with errors, red means go. One way to encourage that attitude is to take the most common mistakes that the class made on a test or quiz and analyze them together. The more open everyone is about the mistakes they've made and how they happened, the less significance any student will place on future errors.

Mistakes happen for concrete reasons. A student didn't memorize all the requisite facts, didn't execute the steps of a process, or perhaps just ignored the directions. The red "X" is just a simple assessment of the actions that student took -- actions he or she can easily fix next time. Sharing that clarity and causality with your students is the best way to teach deliberate practice, instill motivation and help them develop a more constructive relationship with mistakes. In short, this creates the class you and your students have always wanted.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Teaching Students to Embrace Mistakes | Edutopia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For the last ten years, we've worked one-on-one with students from elementary school through graduate school. No matter their age, no matter the material, when you ask what they're struggling with, students almost universally name a subject: "math," "English" or, in some instances, "school."

# data[].attributes.headline
It’s a Mistake Not to Use Mistakes as Part of the Learning Process

# data[].attributes.subject
It’s a Mistake Not to Use Mistakes as Part of the Learning Process

# data[].attributes.body
The problem for students is not that they make mistakes. The real problem is that teachers don't use those mistakes to allow and promote learning. Because shame is currently attached to mistakes, students are afraid to take chances, explore, and think for themselves.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Hearing this talk created in me a great need to examine the many mistakes I have made in my life. I discovered that my mistakes fall into four categories:

1. Those I hid

2. Those I learned nothing from

3. Those I learned from

4. Those I learned from and shared my new knowledge with others.

It's the last two categories that I think have great potential to increase learning and teaching.

Finding Value in Error

Teachers, like doctors, are expected to be mistake free. Administrators, parents, and even other teachers judge them very negatively for making mistakes. Yet when a teacher forms strong relationships with another teacher or two, they share their problems freely, ask for and give advice, and learn from each other. This also happens in schools where mentor teachers share ideas with new teachers.

What would happen if those pairs or threesomes expanded to include a small group of teachers, plus administrators, counselors, or even whole departments or entire school faculties? I know that some schools have created the trust necessary for such discussions. I think this concept could grow to include a wider number of schools, maybe even become a regular professional procedure for all teachers. What would you think of this idea? Is it feasible? Worthwhile? Helpful? An important side effect of discussing mistakes might be to change the perception of mistakes, not only for teachers, but for students as well. When teachers learn from their mistakes, they might be more willing to let students learn from theirs.

Changing perceptions about students' mistakes is the second way that mistakes can improve learning. In the vast majority of classrooms, mistakes are evaluated as poor performance. Grades are lowered by mistakes. Students are encouraged both formally and informally not to make mistakes.

This belief system is absurd. When I thought of the mistakes I made over the years, the bigger my mistake, the more I learned. I learned from my success, also, but not nearly as much. I guess that every reader of this post has learned and is still learning from mistakes.

9 Ways to Teach With Mistakes

The problem for students is not that they make mistakes. The real problem is that teachers don't use those mistakes to allow and promote learning. Because shame is currently attached to mistakes, students are afraid to take chances, explore, and think for themselves. As a clear example of how damaging this view can be, look at the makeup of most gifted and talented programs. In far too many schools, the students in these classes are not the most creative risk takers or unique thinkers. They are the students who scored the highest on standardized tests. Therefore, we label as gifted or talented the students who make the fewest mistakes. I believe that it's a mistake to think of mistakes as something bad. When mistakes become learning opportunities, everything changes. Students take more risks, think in new ways, cheat less, and solve mysteries that had previously eluded them.

Here are some things that we can do in the classroom to change this defeating way of thinking, including both formal and informal evaluation processes:

1. Stop marking errors on tests and papers without explaining why they're wrong. Give enough explanation to help your student understand what went wrong and how to fix it. A big red X is insufficient.

2. Give students a chance to correct their mistakes and redo their work. This allows mistakes to become learning opportunities.

3. Improvement must become a significant factor in the evaluation process. The more a student improves, the higher his or her grade. Nothing shows learning from mistakes more than improvement.

4. When a student makes a mistake in a class discussion, don't say things like, "No, wrong, can anyone help him?" Don't just call on someone else without further comment. Instead, ask the student, "Why do you think so? Can you give an example? If you could ask yourself a question about your answer, what would it be?"

5. My friend and colleague, Madeline Hunter, suggested starting with what is right. If a teacher asks, "Who was the first president of the United States?" and a student answers, "Barack Obama," instead of saying, "You're wrong," try saying, "Barack Obama is a president, you're right about that. However, he wasn't the first. Let's go further back in history." Even silly answers can be responded to in this way.

6. If a student needs help with an answer, let him or her choose a classmate to help. Call the helper something like a "personal consultant."

7. Instead of (or at least in addition to) walls filled with students' achievements, have a wall where students can brag about their biggest mistakes and what they learned from them.

8. Have biweekly class meetings where students share a mistake they made, what happened after, and what they learned.

9. Be sure to tell the class about your own mistakes, especially if they are funny, and what you learned from them.

I would love to see a sign on every entrance to every school that says, "Everyone who enters here will learn." Learning means not being afraid to examine mistakes that teachers make and encouraging students to think in ways that might produce mistakes. Use all these mistakes to learn from, to improve, and to feel good about individual progress.

In the comments below, please share a mistake that you made and what you learned from it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
It's a Mistake Not to Use Mistakes as Part of the Learning Process | Edutopia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Hearing this talk created in me a great need to examine the many mistakes I have made in my life. I discovered that my mistakes fall into four categories: Those I hid Those I learned nothing from Those I learned from Those I learned from and shared my new knowledge with others.

# data[].attributes.headline
Does your classroom put cart before horse?

# data[].attributes.subject
Does your classroom put cart before horse?

# data[].attributes.body
Whether, as a teacher, you are tackling a prescribed set of content, have the luxury of devising your own, or even better, are negotiating the tasks and content with your students, it is worth considering who is doing most of the work. You can’t develop a top footballer without allowing them to practice, try, fail, and try again. The same goes for what we want from our students. Most classrooms are so busy avoiding wrong answers they maintain and develop dependent learners who check with teacher before making any step forward.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Most people assume formal education is a process of individual development from being heavily assisted at the age of 5, moving on to only requiring guidance and eventually achieving full independence and confidence to tackle one's own learning and growth. The sad truth is that most teachers of 18-year-olds will tell you that their students remain heavily dependent on constant guidance and support. I produced the following graphic to sum up the three aforementioned stages and I wonder which one best depicts the average teenager in your education system.

Whether, as a teacher, you are tackling a prescribed set of content, have the luxury of devising your own, or even better, are negotiating the tasks and content with your students, it is worth considering who is doing most of the work. You can't develop a top footballer without allowing them to practice, try, fail, and try again. The same goes for what we want from our students. Most classrooms are so busy avoiding wrong answers they maintain and develop dependent learners who check with teacher before making any step forward.

Where do 'good' students come from?

The top students in any school, through family, sporting or performance experiences, are normally high achievers in spite of school and not because of it. They have arrived at the school having regularly experienced situations where their decision-making mattered, they were or remain responsible for for the success of activities, and the possibility of failure was common. This is exactly the conditions that the average school classroom avoids and thus does not develop the average student into a genuinely motivated, confident citizen. At school, I was very much an average student and can confirm that any motivation and responsible decision making was left until after university. I was kept safe from such matters by the education system I went through and spent my twenties working out how to perform effectively in teams and get projects completed on time.

"...But they get the grades"

Please don't confuse success in exams and grade acquisition for genuine achievement. Many, if not most top grades around the world are achieved through targeted teacher coaching. Coaching only tuned for the specific prescribed challenges of the assessment at hand. This only results in what universities and employers report as school leavers lacking initiative, motivation and professional skills. This is not educational success by any stretch of the imagination. You will still get your grades if you devote time in early years to letting learners experience managing their own learning as a norm and not spoon feeding content to them. This will develop people who have their own coping mechanisms when it comes to exams later.

The Classroom is for developing people

The habits of many schools hand the responsibility of growing the person to extra-curricular activities and not the classroom where the students spend most of their time. The number of times I've heard the words 'all-round education' in discussion of sports or cultural events and at the same time the classroom is reduced to only a place in which information is passed from teacher to student. Many adults make the mistake of thinking "I went to school and turned out alright." But when challenged they will conclude that any confidence or initiative they have has been developed post-school not during. This I feel is a massive missed opportunity that many non-high achievers miss out on.

It's time to make the classroom as challenging as the sports field or theatre stage. Make the students more accountable for what takes place and whether or not it succeeds. Shift the responsibility from teacher to student for organising how the current challenges get tackled. It may go wrong initially by like football players, they'll get better and better until they are ready to face their final school challenges independently.

Play safe and start early

This does not happen overnight. What I propose here is a vision for your school in 5 years time, not tomorrow. Don't dismiss this because you can't picture your more senior students handling the responsibility of devising their own plans for learning. If they haven't had the prior practice they're not going to take charge tomorrow. You have to build the expectations and competencies over a 5 year process. Rethink the learning environments that your school's youngest learners experience and let the current students live out the teacher-directed education they were introduced to as much as they need to. Focus on what your school will offer the next intake and how it will develop them to tackle the content without it being spoon fed from day 1.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Does your classroom put the cart before the horse?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Most people assume formal education is a process of individual development from being heavily assisted at the age of 5, moving on to only requiring guidance and eventually achieving full independence and confidence to tackle one's own learning and growth. The sad truth is that most teachers of 18-year-olds will tell you that their students...

# data[].attributes.headline
Feedback for Thinking: Working for the Answer

# data[].attributes.subject
Feedback for Thinking: Working for the Answer

# data[].attributes.body
Feedback that simply shows a child how to do something won't cause that child to think. He or she will merely learn to replicate what the teacher did without truly "getting" the concept being taught. (Mindset, the effort effect, reflection, and more!!)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We run the risk of giving the wrong kind of feedback for students, and it's not because we are bad people. We love our students. We want them to be successful, and sometimes these desires can actually get in the way of a student truly learning.

Take a typical situation of a math problem involving money. A student is unable to determine the percentage that he or she should be getting, and is struggling with multiplication of decimals. Often we notice this struggle and "swoop in" to save the day. As educators, we sit down with that student and show him or her how to do it, pat ourselves on the back, and move on the next student. In fact, we didn't "save" that student's day -- we may have made no difference at all. Feedback that simply shows a child how to do something won't cause that child to think. He or she will merely learn to replicate what the teacher did without truly "getting" the concept being taught.

3 Strategies for Structured Teaching

We need to move away from this type of feedback and toward feedback that causes thinking and metacognition. Here are three ways that teachers can guide students in the right direction, as described by Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey in their book Better Learning Through Structured Teaching.

1. Questions

We all know that asking questions can help us check for understanding, but questions can also be great tools for having students really articulate their ideas in a deeper way, and allowing them to think about it. Try asking open-ended questions to probe student thinking and push them to think deeper. Instead of "Do you understand that?", move toward questions that cause students to explain and justify their ideas.

2. Prompting

Prompts are statements and questions that cause students to do metacognitive work. We teachers should not be doing their thinking work for them during guided instruction. We should be empowering students to think by using the right type of question or statement. Take this example. A student is working on a written assignment, and the teacher notices that he or she may be missing commas. The teacher says, "I see this paragraph has some commas in it, but the next paragraph seems to have none." This will cause the student to look at the paper with the idea of adding more commas if necessary.

3. Cueing

Similar to prompting, cueing "shifts the learner's attention." Cues are often more specific. There are many types, such as verbal, gestural, and visual. Even highlighting an error on a paper can cause students to think about how they might fix the error without necessarily giving away the answer. With this cue, you prompted thinking. Similarly, a verbal prompt like, "This step in the problem is tricky, don't forget how I modeled it this morning" will shift the students to think and reflect about their process and perhaps move in the right direction. Don't forget that even pointing to something can serve as a cue for students to think.

Errors Versus Mistakes

As you see students struggle with concepts and notice a "wrong" answer, consider this reflective question: "Is it an error or a mistake? How can I find out?" Through specific questioning, you can dig deeper to find out what's going on in a student's head, and make the thinking visible for both of you. Sometimes a wrong answer means a mistake. This implies that a student really does know a concept and only made a misstep in the application of learning. As the teacher, you only need to redirect. However, if you uncover that there is an error, it means that a student really does not understand the concept, and he or she will require a different type of instruction, perhaps further modeling or teaching, and different kinds of prompting, cueing, and questioning.

Dylan William, in Embedded Formative Assessment, says "Feedback should cause thinking," and I couldn't agree more. If we focus on feedback to cause thinking, we can prevent "learned helplessness" in our students. When we limit ourselves to showing students how to do something, or maybe do it for them, we may be communicating to kids that only the teacher can persevere and solve the problem. If we want students who are self-directed learners, then we have to scaffold appropriately -- and then remove the scaffolds. Modeling a concept and thinking aloud are critical components of teaching, but we then need to turn the power over to students and let them struggle and finally experience success. Feedback for thinking creates a "can-do" atmosphere in the classroom.

What are your strategies for encouraging students to think?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Feedback for Thinking: Working for the Answer | Edutopia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We run the risk of giving the wrong kind of feedback for students, and it's not because we are bad people. We love our students. We want them to be successful, and sometimes these desires can actually get in the way of a student truly learning.