Standing at a whiteboard in front of 18 eager teenagers, I felt my face warm as I listened to the student point out my mistake. I was a young teacher who believed I was supposed to be the one with the answers. As the teacher, I was not supposed to err. So I covered in the way that many teachers do: I deflected with humor. “Oh yeah, I meant to do that. I was just testing to see if you were paying attention!” There. Now my students knew I was both infallible and hilarious…right??
Even at that moment, the irony that I had spent hours in the late summer adorning the walls with posters filled with Hallmark-ready quotes encouraging students to take risks and make mistakes was not lost on me. These inspirational posters were not mere rhetoric, but were backed by neuroscience and educational psychology, displaying for students how our brains process errors differently than successes, often leading to deeper learning. I was the young, cutting-edge teacher, letting students know that it’s OK to stumble — “mistakes are the portals of discovery.” (That’s right: Your brilliant math teacher is quoting James Joyce!) Yet there I was, modeling the opposite. Actions speak louder than words…
Unpacking the Paradox in Teaching
A mentor once pointed out to me that education is one of few professions where we’re expected to bat one thousand. It’s understood and accepted that not every patient can be saved, not every deal will be successful, and not every innovation will be adopted, but every student must succeed — and it’s our job to make it so. This expectation creates a paradox in our work: We’re supposed to promote fallibility in learning while being infallible, and at the same time be role models for our students. But how can we do this if we don’t model our flaws?
As I grew in my career, I realized I wasn’t alone in my failure to model failure. I saw my colleagues and mentors cover up mistakes, deflect with jokes, or simply ignore errors when they occurred. We would sit in the faculty lounge over stale coffee and picked-over bagels and lament that our students weren’t comfortable taking risks or unpacking their errors. Don’t they see this is stifling their learning? Why are they so afraid to be wrong? In the rare occasions when we’d admit to our own mistakes, it was always about how we’d successfully deflected away from them. But by failing to model how to err, we were failing our students.
Needing a Culture Shift
Embarrassed by my own hypocrisy, I became curious about this disconnect between my messaging and my modeling. If mistake making is such an essential part of learning, then why don’t we ever talk about how to model being wrong? I decided to tackle this question head on as part of my dissertation research. It was then that I first encountered the concept of Fehlerkultur, a German word that translates to “error culture.” Error culture is the attitudes, behaviors, and actions a community assumes around mistakes. It didn’t take much digging to find that successful learning environments don’t just tolerate errors; they actively cultivate a culture where mistakes are welcome, encouraged, and modeled as part of the learning process. In learning environments with strong Fehlerkultur, educators openly discuss mistakes, analyze them with students, and use them as springboards for deeper understanding about both content and process.
As teachers, we’ve made some progress in this direction. Many classrooms across disciplines have adopted formative assessment and adjusted grading practices to acknowledge learning as a non-monotonic process. In math classrooms, we’ve embraced pedagogical tools like common error analysis, assessment corrections, and self-reflections to help students focus on the opportunities embedded in error. Yet when it comes to modeling error-making ourselves, many educators are far from a perfect batting average.
Turning Over Errors
I still make mistakes every day; I always will. Sometimes it’s a typo on the board; sometimes I write a lousy assessment question or come up with a faulty example; sometimes I realize that the lesson I so carefully planned would have been better a day later. I am now constantly on the lookout for these snags and imperfections, not to cover them up, but to lean in and amplify them. Oh, this is interesting! Let’s look at what happened here. I’ll ask students to help me diagnose where my thinking went wrong. Why doesn’t this work? Or we’ll explore why this particular error is so common. Why is this a sensible mistake? By approaching mistakes with curiosity rather than fear, we open up new ways of thinking and give students permission to tap into error making as a valuable tool for learning.
While they might not always admit it, the students are indeed always watching. As educators, we must recognize that our response to our own errors signals what we truly value in our classrooms. If we are to help students understand that mistakes are stepping stones to learning, we must be willing to walk that path ourselves — and that means letting them see us stumble. We need to let go of our pursuit of the perfect batting average and realize that some of our most valuable hits are the ones where we show our students how to learn with a miss.
