Don't Prevent Students' Mistakes, Prepare for Them

This article comes to me at a great time. I've spent the past 3 days working with a teacher and her 4th grade students teaching and learning with them about collaborative tools in the classroom, how web tools allow us to interact and share with others...and how we are not just consumers of the web, but producers, too! We've also discussed how the use of these tools require huge responsibilities as cyber citizens and life long learners! So... given a very limited amount of time to help these students log in to their new google apps accounts, while guiding the classroom teacher on how this works as well... and also building a foundation for web 2.0 capabilities and discussing internet safety and cyber etiquette... WELL... there's lots of room for mistakes and errors and just bad practices to happen! So... today was the big dive into creating a google form for a reading log that can be shared with each other...as their first document! So... as the Instructional Coach, I was the teacher, and the teacher was a student, and the students had a wide range of experiences as well. Lots of excitement, indeed... but limited time to accomplish the goal. I modeled, I shared, I demonstrated my thinking aloud... but ultimately, I turned them loose to explore, problem-solve, as well as support each other while creating their reading logs! I felt somewhat guilty that there were struggles and so many questions at certain intervals of the process... but I only had so much time and I wanted to give the students active time to struggle with their reading log question types, to think and answer their own questions on building the form and I was certain that time, some guidance and experimentation would lead them to deeper learning. My first post reflective thoughts were...hmmm?? I wonder if today's session was too messy and too open-ended for the teacher Did she value what was happening with her students as much as I did?. But as I reflected on my strategies for monitoring steps where the students had the most questions and giving a bit of instruction as needed..., I watched this allow the students and teacher to keep trying and failing, and trying and succeeding. As I reflected even more on this session later today, I realized that it was the mistakes made by the students and myself, and the collaborative thinking that we all used to problem solve that really solidified all of our learning and it certainly built up the teacher and students' confidence! This article states it well by encouraging us to quit trying to prevent students' mistakes, but to simply plan for them. Indeed... I did this today and it was powerful. I just wish I was with these students and teacher tomorrow....