On Sunday afternoons, I teach an ESL class at our church. My students show incredible character in balancing multiple jobs, care for children and learning English. This past week they taught me something else: doing means making mistakes, which is an essential part of learning.

Their activity was to answer several questions, in a complete sentence, based on a paragraph or two that we had read together. They completed the eight questions, and I walked around the room and asked various ones to write their answers on the board until we had eight answers written in front of us. Then, together, we identified what needed to be changed to make the sentences correct. The changes included capitalization, spelling, punctuation, grammar, and, of course, content.

What struck me was that willingness to make mistakes and learn from them is essential to this process. My students did their best, but still made mistakes (far fewer mistakes, I should add, than I would in Spanish or French – to say nothing of Tagalog or Mandarin). Those mistakes provided the context for our learning because they identified the mistakes, and they fixed them.

Kids are no different. They need to learn the boldness to make mistakes – and learn from them. If they don’t take the risks of action, they cannot reap the benefits of learning.

How do you provide opportunities for you children to make mistakes and learn from them?