When I was taking my required foreign language classes during my undergraduate degree, I was terrified of my teacher. Whenever a student in her class would make a mistake, the teacher would heckle the poor student with uncontained glee. One poor girl had her small mistake made fun of the entire semester. I felt so awkward that each mumbled word had to be pulled from my unwilling mouth. The little knowledge I gained in that foreign language over the course of two painful years has been suppressed into simple greetings and counting to ten. What I remember best from that class was sitting at my desk and silently praying the teacher would not call me. Even when I knew the answer she was searching for, I would still stumble over my words. I somehow hoped that my hushed voice and focused desk staring might deter her from calling on me in the future.
Obviously this is an extreme example of what happens when teachers make fun of wrong answers, but it made me wonder about correcting students during class. Teachers spend so much time trying to engage students and getting them to participate and correcting a wrong answer in an insensitive manner can instantly unravel all of this work. What is the best way to gently correct a blatantly wrong answer? How can a teacher do this in a way that encourages the student to participate again in the future?
1 comment:
I believe this is a delicate situation and like the example in the main post there is a huge problem with putting students down. There are many different times that students will come up with an answer that is totally off base and as a teacher we need to validate the student but also correct them. There are many ways that a teacher can deal with this. One that I use on a regular basis is validating the student by saying something like you are now thinking about it but lets look at it in a different way or lets see what someone else thinks about it. I think that by doing so the student isn't scared of commenting and feels validated, but sees that he/she may not be on the right page.
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