I'm preparing for a Webinar I'm doing next week and am revising some of the materials and exercises based on my experience delivering it for the first time. I'm also a learner right now in some online workshop and one of the best teachers I've encountered in a long while just said something that I'd like write on a post-it note to keep in view or frame to hang on my wall.
"I am comfortable sharing my mistakes as a learning moment. It is much better than just sitting silently feeling bad about them!"
Many of us think that as the "teacher" we have a model a perfect process! After all, we're the suppose to be the expert, right?
However, think about some of your best learning. Was it when everything worked correctly and as expected or was when something went wrong .... really wrong. My most memorable learning experiences as a teacher are when things were going along just swimmingly -- just as I had anticipated and then Wham! something unexpected happened.
It's important to remember in your training to describing when processes or ideas do NOT
work and that is often as or more effective than showing how it does work. Anyone who has done any teaching in a computer lab has probably had this experience. You know, where you show the steps, but when the students try to do it, they make a mistake or go off track in a way that you weren't anticipating. Sometimes you can hear adult students muttering "WTF" to the computer, perhaps why some have dubbed this the "WTF learning principle").
The inspiring trainer of trainers are those who model how mistakes can be teachable moments.
I'm smiling very big, Beth.
Posted by: Nancy White | February 08, 2006 at 05:56 PM
The best math teacher I ever had spent an entire quarter re-deriving the subject's main theorems. He deliberately didn't prepare, so that he had to think through the proofs on the fly. He made mistakes, had to backtrack, got stuck on occasion. It was a great learning experience.
Posted by: Joe Baker | February 10, 2006 at 06:53 AM