Most of us have grown up with the idea that mistakes are bad, especially if we attended test-driven schools, where we were frequently marked down for making mistakes, or our parents punished mistakes with harsh words and actions. This is unfortunate, and this is why.
... [In a workshop, Carol Dweck] announced that every time we make mistakes, synapses fire in the brain, indicating brain growth. All the teachers in the room were shocked, as they had all been working under the premise that mistakes are to be avoided. Carol was drawing from work that has researched the brain’s response when we make mistakes, particularly investigating the different ways brains respond when people have a growth or a fixed mindset.
Jason Moser and his colleagues extended Carol’s work investigating the brain’s response when we make mistakes. Moser and his team found something stunning. They had asked participants to take tests while they monitored the participants’ brains with MRI technology. They looked at the scans when people got questions correct and when they got them incorrect. The researchers found that when people made mistakes, brains were more active, producing strengthening and growth, than when people got work correct. Neuroscientists now agree that mistakes positively contribute to the strengthening of neural pathways.
This learning key is particularly significant because most teachers design classes so that everyone is successful. Curricula and textbooks are designed with trivial, unchallenging questions, so that students will get a high percentage of answers correct. The common belief is that getting most answers correct will motivate students toward greater
success. Here’s the problem, though. Getting questions right is not a good brain exercise.
For students to experience growth, they need to be working on questions that challenge them, questions that are at the edge of their understanding. And they need to be working on them in an environment that encourages mistakes and makes students aware of the benefits of mistakes. This point is critical. Not only should the work be challenging to foster mistakes; the environment must also be encouraging, so that the students do not experience challenge or struggle as a deterrent. Both components need to work together.
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One of the significant characteristics of the highly effective learning described is the presence of mistakes and the role of struggle and error in transforming people from beginners into experts. This is consistent with the brain research showing increased brain activity when people struggle and make mistakes and decreased activity when they get work correct. Unfortunately, most learners think they should always be getting work correct, and many feel that if they make mistakes or struggle, they are not good learners—when this is the very best thing they can be doing.
Practice is important for the development of any knowledge or skill. Anders Ericsson helped the world understand the nature of expert performance and found that most world-class experts—pianists, chess players, novelists, athletes—practiced for around ten thousand hours over twenty years. He also found that their success was not related to tests of intelligence but to the amount of “deliberate practice” they undertook. Importantly, although people succeed because they are trying hard, the people who become experts are trying hard in the right way. A range of different researchers describe effective practice in the same way—people pushing at the edge of their understanding, making mistakes, correcting them, and making more.
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Japan has always scored well in mathematics—it has always finished in one of the top-five TIMSS positions—and was one of the countries visited in the study. The researchers found that Japanese students spent 44 percent of their time “inventing, thinking, and struggling with underlying concepts,” whereas students in the US engaged in this kind of behavior less than 1 percent of the time.
Jim Stigler, one of the authors of the study, writes that the Japanese teachers want the students to struggle—and recalls the times when they would purposely give the wrong answer so that students would go back and work with foundational concepts. In my thousands of observations of classrooms over many years in the US and the UK, I have never seen this kind of practice; more typically I have seen teachers who seem to want to save students from struggle. Many times I have observed students asking for help and teachers structuring the work for students, breaking down questions and converting them into small easy steps. In doing so they empty the work of challenge and opportunities for struggle. Students complete the work and feel good, but often learn little.
I saw a very similar teaching approach, focused on struggle, in a visit to classrooms in China, another country that scores highly in mathematics. I had been asked to visit China to give a talk at a conference and managed, as I like to do, to sneak away and visit some classrooms. In a number of high-school math classrooms, lessons were approximately one hour long, but at no time did I see students working on more than three questions in one hour. This contrasts strongly with a typical US high-school math classroom, where students chug through about thirty questions in an hour—about ten times more. The questions worked on in Chinese classrooms were deeper and more involved than the ones in US classrooms. Teachers would ask provocative questions, deliberately making incorrect statements that students would be challenged to argue against.
One of the lessons I watched was on a topic that is often uninspiring in US classrooms—complementary and supplementary angles. The teacher in China asked the students to define a complementary angle, and the students gave their own ideas for a definition. Often the teacher would push the students’ definition to a place that made it incorrect and playfully ask, “Is this right, then?” The students would groan and try to make the definition more correct. The teacher bantered with the students, playfully extending and sometimes twisting their ideas to push the students to deeper thinking. The students probed, extended, clarified, and justified for a long time, reaching depths that were impressive.
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"I am going to figure this out if it kills me."
When I talk with teachers, they often say this sort of persistence is missing in the students they teach. One of the most common complaints I hear from teachers is that students don’t want to struggle; they want to be told what to do. To the teachers it seems as though students just can’t be bothered with struggling, which is probably what it looks like. The truth is, however, that when students don’t want to struggle, it is because they have a fixed mindset; at some point in their lives they have been given the idea that they cannot be successful and that struggle is an indication that they are not doing well.
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As an academic, I experience a lot of failure. To keep our youcubed center at Stanford running, supporting staff salaries and providing free materials for teachers and parents, we have to apply for lots of grants—most of which are rejected. I also have to submit our papers to journals, where rejection is part of the process. If they are not rejected, they are subject to reviewers’ comments. I have had reviewers dismiss my work entirely, saying that it is “not research, just a story.” It is nearly impossible to keep going as an academic without viewing “failure” as an opportunity to improve. A wise professor named Paul Black, my PhD advisor, once said to me: “Whenever you send a paper to a journal, have in mind the next journal you will send it to when the paper is rejected.” I have used his advice a number of times.
Taking a limitless approach—particularly when embracing challenge and struggle—also helps when we encounter difficult people. In today’s world of social media, it seems impossible to make a statement about anything without getting pushback, some of it aggressive. I have experienced extreme and aggressive pushback many times, and I now know that it is important to stay strong in those moments and to look for something positive. Instead of dismissing a challenge or beating yourself up, think, “I will take something from this situation and use it to improve.”
