making meaningful mistakes

A reasonable goal in life is not to be viewed as a screw-up. Stumbling and fumbling is not how most of us wish to be perceived by our peers or our students. However, we can become so concerned about appearances that we shield ourselves from the benefits of learning from our mistakes. I am proposing that each of us should have as our goal to make a mistake each day in order that we might push ourselves to continuously refine our practices.

Several who have written about the development of expertise (including Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers) have identified a ten thousand hour rule. In brief, what seems consistent across anyone who is an expert (musician, athlete, etc.) is the accumulation of 10,000 hours of practice. Here is how Ericsson differentiates between experts and novices:

The difference between experts and less skilled subjects is not merely a matter of the amount and complexity of the accumulated knowledge; it also reflects qualitative differences in the organization of knowledge and its representation. Experts' knowledge is encoded around key domain-related concepts and solution procedures that allow rapid and reliable retrieval whenever stored information is relevant. Less skilled subjects' knowledge, in contrast, is encoded using everyday concepts that make the retrieval of even their limited relevant knowledge difficult and unreliable.

Hospitals were once required to conduct autopsies. Teaching hospitals (where new doctors were trained) were to maintain a rate of 25%. But that stipulation is not longer enforced. Furthermore, hospitals must absorb the expense (a few thousand dollars) because insurance will not cover the costs. An April 2005 article in the NYTimes Magazine called Buried Answers argues that doctors may continue to misdiagnose illnesses if they avoid using evidence from a post-mortem examination. An autopsy can reveal whether a person died for the reasons the physician claimed or not. But without an autopsy, a doctor may continue to believe his or her view diagnosis was correct. Even the word "autopsy" suggests these are potential learning events as the etymological derivation is "the act of seeing for oneself."

As clear-eyed professionals, we accept the fact that we will make mistakes. Rather than fear those, we should embrace them as opportunities to become smarter. Just as an expert musician practices in order to become more skilled, so too can a science teacher move closer to expertise. Your reflections or debriefings are the educational equivalent of autopsies. You learn what you did wrong and then you develop and grow in order to avoid such problems in the future. During his talk to TCPCG students last fall, William Ayers encouraged us to tally up all our mistakes at the end of every teaching day. And the next morning, we forgive ourselves for those transgressions and vow to do better.