I've been struggling a lot lately with cultivating an environment in which mistakes are acceptable. As a teacher, I feel like I wear two masks in this regard. On the one hand, I directly tell my students that mistakes are acceptable, and even expected, phenomena in the process of learning. Sometimes I specifically ask students to share wrong answers so we can all learn from them. Sometimes I specifically thank students for having (intentionally or unintentionally) made a public mistake, because we can all learn from them. I intentionally discuss (sometimes ad nauseam) the many ways that we all think about different problems, so that students see that there is no One Way to complete a process. And yet...
