One of the great joys of becoming a leader in education is the enforced time spent watching other people teach. Teaching is the most magpie of professions, with ideas stolen from left and right and in my first blog in a long time I pay tribute to a colleague.
As many practitioners have, I have embedded the use of many of the standard tools of AFL, including the whiteboard. A colleague has taken a step further and improved the use of the mini-whiteboard no end. Students are given the opportunity to work on the erasable format very frequently, and many of the students avail themselves of it.
The reason WHY they choose to is the interesting thing — many students struggle with taking on board the idea that they can, and should get stuff wrong. The students arrive with us without the idea that a fall is the first step on the way to learning. Nevertheless we need our students to fail in order to improve. The whiteboard allows them to make mistakes that can be removed. There is no permanent record of their attempt, no chance of being bullied for it. No need to feel bad for it.
It’s a great difficulty that we cannot control our feeder environments — several students are very fragile in regard to their own self-image and instead of revealing in their mistakes, they are terrorized by them.
