Why are there Erasers on our Pencils?

Learning and sharing with my professional colleagues is always richly rewarding. This past Saturday #Satchatwc, regularly hosted by @Burgess_Shelley (Shelley Burgess), was moderated by @dayankee (Don Eckert).  The chat focused on School Culture from the Student Perspective. In reflecting on student learning, I posted this quote (see above) during Saturday’s chat.

Today there are times when we obsess over the desire to be correct or right; thereby skipping right over the opportunity to be “wrong” or “fail”. It is this critical misstep where learners (both students and adults) will lose out on opportunities to learn at a greater depth. When growing up I gained experience from my mistakes when learning how to ride my bike, drive a car, and complete projects for school, and learning the ropes in college (undergrad and post graduate work).  Unfortunately, during those times of “failure” I did not see the future benefit from my mistakes. Only today as an adult do I see how I learned from those “teachable moments” growing up.

Things to consider…

·         Promote a Growth Mindset

·         Encourage students to take risks

·         Offer Student Voice and  Choice

·         Use Real World scenarios in student learning

·         Celebrate learning and –relearning

Students also learn when they see us as educators sitting in the proverbial “student desk”. Our students then see us as active learners. Every day each of us continues to learn and grow. Part of learning is making mistakes, experiencing failure (to some degree), and then learning from those rich educational experiences.  Here me out, I am not encouraging you to “promote failure and mistakes”, I am merely noting that we should allow students to learn and grow from mistakes and errors.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the idea of growing from re-dos. Erasing and correcting, and learning from failure. So since we have erasers on our pencils, we should use them!