Most of the time, school isn’t about performing. It’s about learning. And from a learning perspective, mistakes are necessary and helpful.

In the past, making a mistake was something to be avoided at all costs. How many times were you too afraid to put your hand up at school in case you had the wrong answer? And you certainly didn’t celebrate when you saw red crosses on your page.

Sometimes, mistakes really do need to be avoided. In performance tasks, we don’t usually want to make mistakes. And some mistakes can have serious negative consequences. We certainly don’t want to raise a generation that thinks any mistake, any time, is OK.

But most of the time, school isn’t about performing. It’s about learning. And from a learning perspective, mistakes are necessary and helpful. They tell us where we need to focus our effort to gain mastery and grow.

Psychologist Carol Dweck realised that the negative connotations applied to mistakes were contributing to the Fixed Mindset. To someone with a Fixed Mindset, a mistake is permanent, a sign of their limits. As a result, they might avoid or ignore mistakes rather than engage in a learning process to correct them.

However, some people have misinterpreted Dweck’s research to mean that we should counter the old negative connotations of mistakes by applauding them as good things. In fact, in a learning context, mistakes are neither good nor bad. They are simply signposts that tell us what we are yet to learn.

What is important is learning and growth. And what leads to learning and growth is action.

Instead of praising and celebrating mistakes, we need to praise actions that lead to growth.

There are two elements to praising actions:

Praising the specific actions a student takes to fix a mistake.

• It’s the correction of the mistake that leads to learning and growth. For example, a student who takes a targeted approach to a maths problem by trying three different strategies before nailing the correct answer.
  

Praising students when they take on challenges outside their current abilities.

• If a student always takes on something easy, something they know they will get right, they aren’t growing. But if they consistently step just out of their comfort zone and are comfortable with making mistakes as they try something new, they acquire new skills and abilities.
  

Taken from: https://mindfulbydesign.com/need-stop-praising-mistakes/