Math Without Mistakes – Discussion

[Simonay Hudson]

This was brilliant, here are some of my key take-aways:

“important for us as educators to retrain our thinking- wrong answers are so interesting!”

“Wrong answers often represent a lot of mathematical thinking. It’s up to us as educators, to discover and inquire after that thought and use that as a resource for student learning in math and also for our relationship with that student” “It’s up to us to understand that brilliance and to celebrate it and then develop it”

Hearing “this is really interesting” rather than “it’s okay you made a mistake” makes a huge difference to students

Think about what would have to change about this scenario or within this problem space, for this to be the correct answer (communicates value to the student’s answer, the student who got it wrong initially) and also gives students who got it correct something more to think about (develops their learning)

as an educator, it’s on us to offer experiences that reveal the limits of students’ current ideas (as their current ideas are not mistaken, although they can at times be wrong, there is often rightness in all of their ideas, however incomplete. They are “operating out of the limits of their knowledge with a lot of sincerity”)

Asking for wrong answers can be useful (takes the pressure off, and decenters the teachers thinking, focuses on the children’s thinking, you can see they know what’s not right, even if they are struggling to find what they need to get the right answer)

Students’ ideas are such precious things, we don’t want to discourage them from offering that

(which is often what we do when we dismiss them as mistakes when they really were intentional and based on their current knowledge/understanding/how they’re making sense of things at this point. And we want to encourage this thread of making sense of things, and give them the missing information to help them make connections and fill those gaps; to help them develop their ideas. Let us not discourage thinking.)