Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021

Technique 12: Culture of error
Check for understanding

In a recent article about his development as a musician, the pianist Jeremy Denk observed a hidden challenge of teaching and learning: “While the teacher is trying to … discover what is working, the student is in some ways trying to elude discovery, disguising weaknesses in order to seem better than she is.”¹⁰

His observation is a reminder: If the goal of Checking for Understanding is to bridge the gap between I taught it and they learned it, that goal is far easier to accomplish if students want us to find the gap, if they are willing to share information about errors and misunderstandings—and far harder if they seek to prevent us from discovering them.

Left to their natural inclinations, learners will often lean toward the latter. Out of pride or anxiety, sometimes out of appreciation for us as teachers—they don't want us to feel like we haven't served them well—students will often seek to “elude discovery” unless we build cultures that socialize them to think differently about mistakes. A classroom that has such a culture has what I call a Culture of Error.

Those teachers who are most able to diagnose and address errors quickly make Check for Understanding (CFU) a shared endeavor between themselves and their students. From the moment students arrive, they work to shape their perception of what it means to make a mistake, pushing them to think of “wrong” as a first, positive, and often critical step toward getting it “right,” socializing them to acknowledge and share mistakes without defensiveness, with interest or fascination even, or possibly relief—help is on the way!

The term “psychological safety” is often used to describe a setting in which participants are risk-tolerant. Certainly psychological safety is a critical part of a classroom with a Culture of Error, but I would argue that the latter term goes farther: it includes both psychological safety—feelings of mutual trust and respect and comfort in taking intellectual risks—and appreciation, perhaps even enjoyment, for the insight that studying mistakes can reveal. In a classroom with a Culture of Error, students feel safe if they make a mistake, there is a notable lack of defensiveness, and they find the study of what went wrong interesting and valuable.

You can see this happening in the video Denarius Frazier: Remainder. Gathering data through Active Observation (technique 9), he spots a consistent error. As students seek to divide polynomials they struggle to find the remainder. Fagan is one of many students who have made the mistake. Denarius takes her paper and projects it to the class so they can study it. His treatment of this moment is critical. There is immense value in studying mistakes like this if teachers can make it feel psychologically safe. Unfortunately, it doesn't take a lot of imagination to picture the moment going wrong—badly wrong. The student could feel hurt, offended, or chastened. Her classmates could snicker. Perhaps you are imagining the phone call that evening: Let me see if I have this right, Mr. Frazier. You projected my daughter's mistakes on the overhead for everyone to see?

But in Denarius's hands, the moment proceeds beautifully and, more importantly, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to acknowledge a mistake and study it. How does he do it?

First, notice his tone. Denarius is emotionally constant. He is calm and steady. There's no suggestion of blame. He sounds no different whether he is talking about success or struggle. Next, he uses group-oriented language to make it clear that the issue they'll study is common among the class. “On a few of our papers, I'm noticing that we're getting an incorrect remainder …” he says. The mistake is ours; it's relevant to and reflective of the group, not just the individual. There's no feeling that Fagan has been singled out.

Another important characteristic of classrooms like Denarius’s has to do with how error itself is dealt with. It is best captured in a phrase math teacher Bob Zimmerli uses in the video Culture of Error Montage: “I'm so glad I saw that mistake,” he tells his students. “It's going to help me to help you.” His phrase suggests that the error is a good thing. He calls the class to attention to show it is a worthy and serious topic, but he simultaneously normalizes the error through tone and word choice.

This is different from—the opposite of in many ways—pretending it is not really an error. Notice that Bob explicitly identifies the mistake as a mistake. His goal is to make it feel normal and natural, not to minimize the degree to which students felt they had erred. I mention this because sometimes teachers struggle with this distinction. In workshops we occasionally ask teachers to write phrases that they could use to express to students the idea that it is normal and useful to be wrong. They sometimes suggest responses like “Well, that's one way you could do it,” or “Let's talk about some other ways,” or “OK, maybe. Good thinking!”

These phrases blur the line between correct and incorrect or avoid telling students they are wrong. There are, of course, times when it's useful to say, “Well, there's no right answer, but let's consider other options.” But that is a very different moment from the one in which a teacher should say something like “I can see why you'd think that but you're wrong, and the reasons why are really interesting,” or “A lot of people make that mistake because it seems so logical, but let's take look at why it's wrong.”

You can see another example of this in the Culture of Error Montage. Mathew Gray, like Denarius, is sharing a mistake—this one made by a student named Elias (a Show Call, technique 13). He notes this right away: “Elias has made a mistake,” but he notes that this is not a surprise because he made the question difficult and that others have made the mistake as well. Then crucially he adds, “It's a mistake that I made when I first read the poem.” He is the teacher and he, too, has struggled to understand. What could more fully contradict the idea that being an expert somehow means that one does not make mistakes? The idea is not to forestall defensiveness by making students believe they are correct, in other words, but to forestall defensiveness by helping students to see that the experience of making a mistake is normal and valuable.

Here are some other phrases that do that:

· “I'm glad I saw that mistake. It teaches us something we have to fix before we've mastered this.”

· “I like that your first instinct was to use geometry, but in this situation, we have to solve algebraically.”

· “Yes, the writing here makes it very challenging to follow who is saying what. But that phrase is spoken by Mary and not by John. Let's take a look at how we know that.”

· “What I am asking you to do is difficult. Even working scientists struggle with it. But I know we'll get it, so let's take a look at what went wrong here… .”

It's worth noting that the statements are different. The first flips student expectation; the teacher is glad to have seen the mistake. The second gives credit to the student's understanding of the mathematical principles—but makes it clear that she's come up with the right answer for a different setting. The third and fourth acknowledge that the task is not the sort of thing you try just once and get right. They normalize struggle.

As this Culture of Error is created, students become more likely to want to expose their mistakes. This shift from defensiveness or denial to openness is critical. As a teacher you can now spend less time and energy hunting for mistakes and more time learning from them. Similarly, if the goal is for students to learn to self-correct—to find and address errors on their own—becoming comfortable acknowledging mistakes is a critical step forward.

Building a Culture of Error

A teacher alone cannot establish a culture in which it is safe to struggle and fail. If snickers greet a classmate who gets an answer wrong, for example, or if impatient hands wave in the air while another student is trying to answer, very little that a teacher does will result in students feeling safe exposing their mistakes to the group.

Shaping how students respond to one another's struggles is, therefore, a must. It is a process that starts with teaching students the right way to handle common situations. That is, explain how you expect them to act when someone struggles before it happens, share the rationale, practice the expected behaviors in hypothetical situations, and if (when) a breach occurs, reset the culture firmly, but with understanding. You might say something like, “Just a minute. I want to be very clear that we always support each other and help one another in this classroom. And we never, ever undertake actions that tear down another person. It's difficult but I will expect that of all of you. Among other things, we know that person could just as well be us.”

When you think about making it safe to struggle, it's important to consider that the goal is not just eliminating potentially negative behaviors among students. Even better would be fostering a culture where students actively support one another as they struggle through the learning process. Collegiate Academies in New Orleans does a great job of encouraging this culture. When someone is struggling to answer a question, peers (or teachers) “send magic,” making a subtle hand gesture that means, “I'm supporting you.” After an answer, if peers wish to show appreciation (they often do), they show it with snapping fingers, thus creating a system for positive student-to-student feedback for quality work.¹¹ This positive culture is one of the most remarkable and powerful things about a remarkable group of schools.

And of course having strong Habits of Attention (technique 48) is critical to ensure that signals of belonging are strong and the importance of each student's ideas is regularly reinforced.

That said, building a classroom culture that respects, normalizes, and values error is complex work, so I've named and described some of the key culture building moves in greater detail so they're easier to use intentionally in your classroom.

Expect Error

After a mistake occurs, strive to show that you are glad to know about it. We want the overall message to be that errors are a normal part of learning—a positive part, often—and are most useful when they are out in the open.

Consider how Roxbury Prep math teacher Jason Armstrong communicated the normalcy of error even before he started reviewing answers to a problem recently. “I suspect there's going to be some disagreement here, so I might hear a couple different people's answers,” he said, before taking four different answers from the class. His words implied that the normal state of affairs is to see different answers among smart people doing challenging work. This also serves to teach that math is not just a matter of deciding between a right answer and a wrong one but, sometimes, a matter of deciding among a wide array of plausible answers. If the questions are hard, Jason's teaching intimated, of course people will disagree.

Withhold the Answer

In the video Culture of Error Montage you can see Jason introduce a second problem from the same lesson. His choice of language was again striking:

OK, now for the four answers we have here, A, B, C, and D, I don't want to start by asking which one you think is right, because I want to focus on the explanations that we have. So let me hear what people think of D. I don't care if you think it's right or wrong; I just want to hear what people think. Eddie, what did you say about it?

You've probably noticed that Jason's language emphasizes the importance of mathematical thinking (as opposed to just getting it right). That's valuable. In situations when many teachers say things like, “I want to focus on the explanation. How you think about this is as important as whether you got it right,” what Jason does is different because students don't know whether or not they are discussing a right answer. He has asked them not to discuss how they got the answer they gave—and therefore think is right—but an answer that he chose.

We often begin reviewing a problem by revealing the right answer and then, suspense alleviated, talking about it. However, as soon as students know the right answer, the nature of their engagement tends to change. They shift to thinking about whether they got it right and how well they did. No matter how much they love the math for the math's sake (or history or science or literature for its sake), part of them is thinking “Yes! I got it,” or “Darn, I knew that,” or “Darn, why do I keep messing up?” If Jason had said, “The answer here is B, but I want to look at D,” some students would almost assuredly have thought, “Cool, I knew that,” and then stopped listening as closely because in their minds they had gotten it right and didn't need to listen.

One of the simplest and easiest things you can do to begin building a Culture of Error is to delay revealing whether an answer is right or wrong until after you've discussed it, and perhaps an alternative.

You can see Katie Bellucci do this in the video Katie Bellucci: Different Answers. She begins by asking students to use hand signals (see technique 10, Show Me) to reveal their answers to a multiple-choice question. “We have some different answers out here,” she says, “I see some twos, threes, and fours. B, C, and D.” Her tone is cheery, indicating that disagreement—and therefore wrong answers—is not a bad thing. It only proves the discussion will be interesting. But notice what she does next. As she begins reworking the problem with the help of her students, she does not tell them which of those answer choices was correct.

By withholding the answer until after she's discussed the question fully, Katie retains a bit of suspense, keeps students productively engaged, and avoids the distraction of “Did I get it right?” for a few seconds. This can be very productive, not just as an intellectual exercise, but as a cultural one, in causing students to spend less energy evaluating their work and more energy thinking about the underlying ideas (“I hadn't thought of doing it that way. I wonder if she'll get the answer I got”).

Her lovely move to normalize and celebrate error—“Put your hand up if you changed your answer. Yes, be proud! You figured it out,” is a perfect way to express the core of the idea in Culture of Error—the fun is in the process. She celebrates struggle in the most compelling way, but that moment is really only possible if everyone is invested in “figuring it out” with her throughout the process, and it all starts with her decision to withhold the answer.

Manage the Tell

In poker circles, players have to watch their “tell”—the unintentional signals they give that reveal the status of their hand to savvy opponents. A good player can figure out that an opponent's habit of rubbing his eyes or rechecking his cards is a nervous tic revealing a poor hand. Having a tell puts you at such a disadvantage that some elite players wear sunglasses and hooded sweatshirts to ensure they don't reveal too much.

As teachers, we also have tells—unintentional cues that reveal our hand, such as whether an answer was right or wrong or whether we valued what a student said. A tell causes us to communicate more than we realize. It compromises our ability to withhold the answer. And it can often result in our unwittingly communicating disdain for errors.

One of my tells as a teacher was the word “Interesting,” offered in a benign but slightly patronizing tone of voice and usually with a “Hmmm” in front of it and a single, long blink of both eyes. I would use it, without realizing it, in my English classes when a student offered an interpretation I thought was flimsy. I know this was my tell because one day after a student comment, I said, “Hmmm. Interesting.” At that point, a student named Danielle said quite clearly from the back of the classroom, “Uh oh. Try again!” She knew what “interesting” meant: “Well, that was disappointing.” Like most teachers, I was saying a lot more than I thought I was. My message really was, “You probably should have kept that thought to yourself,” and the student who'd spoken and all my students knew that. So much for making it safe to be wrong.

Compare that to Emily Badillo's response to student errors in the video Emily Badillo: Culture of Error. Her facial expression does not change whether students are right or wrong. She's the same steady, emotionally constant self. It helps that she withholds the answer. There's no giveaway at all.

We all have tells—several, probably—and because they are unintentional, we may send them over and over, communicating a message to students that undercuts what we might intend to say. One of my most capable colleagues describes a different tell. When students gave an answer in her class, she would write it on the board if it were correct, but wouldn't bother to write it if it were wrong. Sometimes she would call on a student and turn to the board, marker poised as if to write, only to turn back to the class upon hearing the answer, and recap the marker: Click. Message received.

Students figure out our tells surprisingly quickly, so it's important to seek them out in our own teaching and manage them. Of course, we'll never be perfect. Of course, it's fine to say, “Interesting” or even to explicitly say, “I think we can do better” or “No, I'm sorry, that's not correct.” You just want to be aware of and intentional about what you communicate and when. Think for a moment about what might be the most common teacher tell: “Does anyone have a different answer?” (When was the last time you said that when someone got it right?) In using this phrase without intentionality, you would first communicate that the answer was wrong and therefore risk discouraging students from thinking as deeply about it as they would if they didn't know. Second, you would imply to the student who answered, “If that's all you've got, please don't speak again.”

It's worth noting that the most persistent tells are usually in response to wrong answers, but we can also have tells for right answers—a big, bright face or perhaps the inflection on the word “why” in a statement like, “And can you tell us why you think Wilbur is afraid?” Clearly, it's not a negative to show appreciation and enthusiasm for a great answer. But it is worth considering whether that enthusiasm sometimes gives away too much, too soon or, if it's used too often, what its absence communicates. Ideally, we are all alert to our tells and manage them—replacing them as often as possible with a consistent and balanced expression of appreciation that's not quite approval.

Praise Risk-Taking

The final aspect of creating a Culture of Error is to praise students for taking risks and facing down the challenge of a difficult subject. It's especially useful to encourage students to take risks when they're not sure. A statement such as, “This is a tough question. If you're struggling with it, that's a good sign. Now, who'll be bold and start us off?” reminds students that being a scholar means offering your thoughts when you're not sure, and sometimes because you're not sure. You can reinforce that positively by saying, for example, “I love the fact that this is a hard question and so many of you have your hands in the air,” or you can shorthand that by simply referring to your students' “brave hands” when you see them raised (for example, “Who wants to take a shot at our challenge question? Beautiful. Love those brave hands … Diallo, what do you think?”). If discussing a particularly difficult passage in a book, you could try acknowledging the difficulty by saying something like, “This is a question that people have debated for decades, but you're really attacking this.” You can see Denarius Frazier do this in the Culture of Error montage. “Ohhh, I like this bravery,” he says, looking out at a handful of students willing to try to answer a difficult question. In a Culture of Error, students should feel good about stepping out on a limb, whether they're right or wrong.

Putting It All Together: Jasmine Howard, Nicole Warren, and the Back (or Front) Table

The video Jasmine Howard: College Bound provides a beautiful example of Standardize the Format, Active Observation, Show Me, and Culture of Error in a single clip, shot in her eighth-grade math class at Freedom Prep in Memphis, Tennessee. She's chosen one problem within a larger problem set as a sort of gatekeeper. It's a sort of mid-class Exit Ticket. Jasmine circulates and observes. She's using a version of Active Observation that's more focused on preparing to give group feedback than on giving individual feedback to every student. Based on these observations, she reviews the problem with the whole class and, as she does so, uses Show Me to check that students arrived at answer A. She then sends students to independent practice but walks around and signals subtly to four students to meet her at the back table. There, Jasmine teaches a targeted mini-lesson for the students who needed more help, observing and supporting them as they work. Here you can see her Standardizing the Format as she asks students to circle the rate of change to ensure that they both calculated it correctly and know what it is. She does this with impeccable Culture of Error—steady, supportive, nonjudgmental. You can see how much the students feel this as they get up from their desks to come to the back table. The first student she taps starts to gather his things and move right away. He's not embarrassed and he's not trying to hide. He trusts in Jasmine to help him and you can see why when you watch her reteach. Jasmine has caught a simple misunderstanding early, before it snowballed, and adeptly has given them just the support they need to understand the concept. It's one of the most impressive takes on differentiation through Check for Understanding I've had the pleasure of watching.

Not only that, but Jasmine's forming a group for reteaching in “real-time” Checking for Understanding reminded me of another clip of Nicole Warren doing something similar. You can see this in the clip Nicole Warren: Front Table in her third-grade classroom at Leadership Prep Ocean Hill. Nicole calls students up to the front table for extra practice after the previous day's Exit Ticket revealed that they continued to struggle with story problems.

In part, she told me, she wanted to pull them up front to watch them solve the problem “so I could stop them in the moment, if necessary, and be sure they were using the strategy we had discussed the day before. Since we already spent time debriefing this problem, I wanted to be sure they were practicing correctly to solidify the skill.”

In other words, Nicole observes all students carefully, but she also structured her classroom so she can occasionally observe students she's worried about even more carefully. Everyone gets real-time feedback; but this allows her to give a double dose to those who need it most. And you'll notice that they get a ton of feedback—positive in tone but rigorous—and they get the implicit feedback of knowing—when they are sent back to their seats—that they've mastered, at least for the moment, the skill that Nicole had targeted.

One of the most important things Nicole does to make her front table system work is to think about how to leverage her Culture of Error—there has to be no judgment, no stigma, no snickering about working at the front table. Nicole's messaging sets that up.

“Pulling a small group has never had a stigma. I think it has to do with how we frame it. We tell students, ’This is a moment to get extra practice one-on-one or in a small group with your teacher.’ We never make this time feel negative in any way and students leave feeling successful, after getting the problem correct. We use stickers, high-fives, and smiles to commend them for showing effort through a tricky problem. In addition, the students who come up to the table are always different, based on the [most current] data. Sometimes it is students who are on the higher end, too. This helps to normalize the idea that everyone struggles and that this struggle is a part of the process that leads to mastery.”

By the way, a couple of other favorite Teach Like a Champion moments from this Nicole Willey clip: Nicole uses Brighten the Lines (technique 28), when she uses the prompt “Go!” after her directions to help ensure that students jump right into their work. She also uses What to Do (technique 52) beautifully to make sure one of her front-table scholars is listening to her feedback. The student looks like he wants to start going before he really hears what she's saying, so she says, “Look at me” (twice!), in a warm, supportive tone backed by a smile.

Like Jasmine, Nicole has designed her classroom around the idea of Checking for Understanding.