We learn through making mistakes, missteps and failures. A supportive educational environment provides a safe place for students to make mistakes and learn from them. For example, all of our students participate in fine arts and courses that we call practical arts such as woodworking or handwork (where students learn to knit and sew amongst other skills). In all artistic endeavors, students are faced with artistic or technical problems or challenges that they need to overcome. Often the process of completing a project in any of these disciplines will involved mistakes that result in a new problem or challenge that the student will have to address. This is the nature of working with visual or practical arts and it exercises the students ability to try, make mistakes, adjust, and move on. In academic work, our teachers strive to create an environment and culture in the classroom where students can make mistakes as part of normal learning process, instead of feeling shame. One of our parents remarked that when they visited one of our classrooms as a prospective parent they observed a math class and students were asked to share their answers to a problem and he was impressed with how many students eagerly offered to share their answers—there was no sense of fear about potentially being wrong. We also don’t give letter grades until high school. We believe that this helps to foster a love of learning for learning’s sake in our students and helps them to learn to see making mistakes not as an end but as part of a process of learning. Read more about the value of making mistakes in learning from the Association of Waldorf Schools in North America:
