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WHY WE SHOULD LOVE MISTAKES, STRUGGLE, AND EVEN FAILURE

OUR LIVES are filled with mistakes. We make them all the time, and they are simply part of everyday life. Even though mistakes sometimes make no difference or end up producing fortuitous results, most of us instinctively respond to mistakes by mentally beating ourselves up and feeling terrible. It is not surprising that large sections of the population respond negatively to mistakes. 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.

LEARNING KEY #2

The times when we are struggling and making mistakes are the best times for brain growth.

When we are willing to face obstacles and make mistakes in the learning process, we enhance neural connections that expedite and improve the learning experience. The research on the positive impact of mistakes and struggle is emerging from both neuroscience¹ and behavioral studies of high-achieving people.² Some of this work is counterintuitive, as we have believed for so long in the absolute necessity that everything be “correct.” Releasing people from the idea that they must always be correct and not make any mistakes turns out to be transformative.

The Science of Mistakes

I first became aware of the positive impact of mistakes when I was hosting a workshop for teachers and Carol Dweck, the pioneer of mindset research, joined us. The teachers attending the workshop that day had gathered in a large group and listened attentively to Carol. She 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.³

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.⁴ 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 to create an ideal learning experience.

Author Daniel Coyle studied “talent hotbeds,” places producing a larger proportion than normal of high-achievers, and concludes that achievement comes not from any natural-born ability, but rather from a special kind of work and practice. He has studied examples of those who excel at learning in music, sports, and academic subjects. His research reveals that all of the people who achieved at very high levels engaged in a particular kind of practice that caused the coating of brain pathways with myelin.

Our brains function through an interconnected web of nerve fibers (including neurons), and myelin is a form of insulation that wraps around fibers and increases their signal strength, speed, and accuracy. When we revisit an idea or kick a soccer ball, myelin coats the neural pathways involved, optimizing the particular circuits and making our movements and thoughts more fluid and efficient in the future. Myelin is vital to the learning process. Most learning takes time, and myelin aids the process by reinforcing signals and slowly strengthening pathways. Coyle gives a number of examples of the highest-achieving mathematicians, golfers, soccer players, and pianists practicing their craft and describes the role of myelin in wrapping layers of insulation around their neural circuits. He characterizes the world’s experts as having “super-duper pathways” wrapped in layer upon layer of myelin, which makes them very effective.

So how do we all develop “super-duper pathways”? This occurs when people are working at the edge of their understanding, making mistake after mistake in difficult circumstances, correcting mistakes, moving on and making more mistakes—constantly pushing themselves with difficult material.

Coyle starts his book with an interesting story of learning. He describes the case of a thirteen-year-old girl he calls Clarissa, who is learning the clarinet. Clarissa, he says, has no musical “gifts,” lacks a “good ear,” and has only an average sense of rhythm and subpar motivation—yet she became famous in music circles, because she managed to accelerate her learning by ten times, according to the calculations of music psychologists. This amazing learning feat was captured on video and has been studied by music experts. Coyle describes watching the video of Clarissa practicing and suggests that the video be given a title of “The Girl Who Did a Month’s Worth of Practice in Six Minutes.” He describes the practice session this way:

Clarissa draws a breath and plays two notes. Then she stops. She pulls the clarinet from her lips and stares at the paper. Her eyes narrow. She plays seven notes, the song’s opening phrase. She misses the last note and immediately stops, fairly jerking the clarinet from her lips. … She starts over and plays the riff from the beginning, making it a few notes farther into the song this time, missing the last note, backtracking, patching in the fix. The opening is beginning to snap together—the notes have verve and feeling. When she’s finished with this phrase, she stops again for six long seconds, seeming to replay it in her mind, fingering the clarinet as she thinks. She leans forward, takes a breath, and starts again.

It sounds pretty bad. It’s not music; it’s a broken-up, fitful, slow-motion batch of notes riddled with stops and misses. Common sense would lead us to believe that Clarissa is failing. But in this case common sense would be dead wrong.⁵

A music expert watching the video commented on Clarissa’s practice, saying it was “amazing” and, “If somebody could bottle this, it’d be worth millions.” Coyle points out: “This is not ordinary practice. This is something else: a highly targeted, error-focused process. Something is growing, being built. The song begins to emerge, and with it, a new quality within Clarissa.”⁶

In each of the learning cases Coyle reviews, he says that the learner has “tapped into a neurological mechanism in which certain patterns of targeted practice build skill. Without realizing it, they have entered a zone of accelerated learning that, while it can’t quite be bottled, can be accessed by those who know how. In short, they’ve cracked the talent code.”⁷

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.⁸ 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.⁹ 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.

A Different View of Struggle

Every four years an international test of mathematics and science called TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) is conducted in fifty-seven countries. In the last round of testing, Singapore was the highest-performing country in mathematics. The information from such tests is not very useful if we do not know what approach countries use to bring about their results. Accordingly, a group of researchers studied the nature of math teaching by going into classrooms and recording a representative sample of the teaching in seven countries. This teaching study uncovered a number of noteworthy outcomes.¹⁰ One finding was that the mathematics curriculum in the US is “a mile wide and an inch deep” compared to the curriculum in more successful countries.

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.

Contrast this with the standard US lesson on the same topic. Teachers often give definitions of complementary and supplementary angles to students, who then practice with thirty short questions. The defining characteristic of the lesson in China was struggle—the teacher deliberately put the students in situations where they became stuck and had to think hard. The lesson was entirely consistent with researchers’ description of targeted, mistake-focused practice. As Coyle says, the best way to build a highly effective circuit is to “fire it, attend to mistakes, then fire it again.” This is what the teachers in China were enabling their students to do.

Elizabeth and Robert Bjork are scientists at UCLA who have studied learning for decades. They point out that a lot of learning that happens is very unproductive, as the most important learning events often go against intuition and deviate from standard practices in schools. They highlight the importance of “desirable difficulties,” again suggesting that the brain needs to be pushed to do things that are difficult. They particularly highlight the act of retrieving information from the brain, as every time we retrieve something, it changes in the brain and is more accessible when needed later.¹¹

Many people study for tests by rereading materials, but the Bjorks point out that this is not very helpful for the brain. A much more helpful way of reviewing material is to test yourself, so that you keep having to recall the material—and hopefully make mistakes and correct them along the way. Learning scientists point out that these tests should not be performance events, as these cause stress and reduce the learning experience. Nonevaluative self-testing or peer testing is most beneficial.¹²

Teaching the Value of Mistakes

As neuroscience becomes more established as a field, it seems that more and more evidence is revealing the value of mistakes and struggle. Good teachers have known this intuitively and impressed upon learners that mistakes are really good opportunities for learning. Unfortunately, I have found that this message is not strong enough to keep students from feeling bad when they make mistakes—often because of the performance culture in which many good teachers work. Even when the message is phrased more powerfully—that mistakes are good not only for learning, but for brain growth and connectivity—it is hard for teachers to send it in a system in which they are made to give students tests that penalize them every time they make a mistake.

This highlights the challenge of changing education—it is a complex system that has many different parts, all of which impact each other. Teachers can give the right messages to students, but then witness their messages being undermined by a practice that is imposed by their school district. This is why I encourage any teacher who learns about effective messages and teaching ideas to share them not only with their students, but with administrators and parents as well.

When teachers encourage students to make mistakes and struggle, it is incredibly freeing. New Zealand second-grade teacher Suzanne Harris began teaching in an era of procedural teaching and timed testing. When she read one of my books, she knew that what she felt was right was backed up by research and asked her principal if she could teach the “Jo Boaler way”! He agreed. Suzanne went on to make many changes, one of which was to explain the positive benefits of mistakes and struggle to her students. In my interview with Suzanne, she described how this and other messages had changed things for a young boy in her class.