Just as the molecule is the smallest possible piece of matter, the question and answer is the smallest unit of educational communication.  Not surprisingly, the omnipresent Q&A plays a big role in lower school classrooms. 
 
You might assume that, in our socially attentive Quaker school, lower school teachers try to refrain from telling students outright that an answer is wrong.  If so, you would be mistaken.  Counterintuitive as it may seem, responding to a wrong answer by hemming and hawing about what a great (if errant) suggestion it is and that it is “a good try just the same,” sends the subliminal message that the student has done something so wayward that its name must not be spoken.  And, lower school students generally can sniff out a contrived, feel-good response very quickly.  Conversely, identifying a wrong answer in a nonchalant-but-direct way sends the message that mistaken replies are expected, valid, and even valuable.  Certainly, they are nothing shameful.

In our ongoing divisional project to chronicle the best practices of lower school teachers, the faculty places engaging students in authentic dialogue at the top of the list.  Teachers are diplomatic, naturally, but they also try to be direct, honest, and quick to concede if they discover they have made a mistake.  Candor is key. 

How do we help students feel comfortable taking the intellectual risks that are so vital to effective teaching?  For starters, we share with them many up-sides of being wrong.  For example, when part of a group, being wrong can illuminate a dead end and help point everyone in a more productive direction.  When working on their own, becoming comfortable with their own fallibility liberates students to be fearlessly creative, to think outside the box, and to turn problems on their head in seeking solutions.  Even if they frequently get a wrong answer, we tell students, they are still one certain step closer to being right -- and are engaging in an efficient process that generates high quality and ever-more-likely-to-be-correct solutions. 

I do not mean to suggest that the questions asked in lower school classrooms always have only one correct answer.  In fact, there are often a variety of perfectly acceptable, more-or-less correct results.  However, as we celebrate multiple perspectives and even multiple truths in our lower school classrooms, we always communicate to our students that making mistakes is okay and an important part of learning and growing.

 

Michael Zimmerman, Lower School Director