Middle Years 

Learning from mistakes

Part of growing up is about learning from experiences and mistakes. 

I recently had a conversation with a parent about developing my academic writing. One of the ways I have been working on this is by setting aside time to specifically write in this way as well as gain feedback on what I have written. For me it is early in the morning when I write, and my university supervisors provide feedback. Unfortunately, the feedback usually involves a lot of red pen (or online comments)! However, this all offers a great opportunity to learn from my mistakes and illustrates that making mistakes is part of the learning process. If you don’t make mistakes, how do you learn?

A key to learning from mistakes is feedback as this allows us to learn more efficiently. According to the evolutionary theory of learning, the borrowing and reorganizing principle states that as humans, most of our learning is borrowed—in the form of schema—from the long-term memories of other people. This occurs through feedback of some kind. When we follow the feedback of others we mostly reorganize and construct new and meaningful representation of this information. We in effect learn more efficiently than just making it up ourselves. For those interested in this evolutionary theory of learning you might like this paper by John and Susan Sweller.    

MYPEC students often make mistakes in the classroom, in their behaviour, or in their co-curricular activities. What I would encourage is for them to ensure that they stop, seek feedback, and make a plan as to what they would do next time (or in hindsight). Acting on feedback is a valuable and efficient part of the learning process. If students aren’t sure of what their mistake was, I encourage them to politely ask what they need to do to improve. Feedback on mistakes should be more work for the receiver to help learn and improve from any of these mistakes.

I hope all Middle Years students have a relaxing break over the holidays. Term 4 will certainly be busy, but also exciting. I encourage all Middle Years Students to read through their Term 3 report learning advice (feedback). This is a great opportunity to learn from any mistakes made in Term 3.     

Ben Hawthorne

Head of Middle Years