We all make mistakes, so let’s learn from them!
One of the most difficult parts of being a teacher is having a great lesson with your students and thinking they are totally understanding the math concept, only to have them complete an exit ticket or homework assignment completely wrong! It can be discouraging, especially when their mistakes can be easily avoided and are a result of just not paying attention to their work!
Sound familiar? This happens all the time in my middle school math resource classroom – and I can guarantee that my students are doing the same thing in their general education classes! This year, I wanted to help my students recognize and understand their mistakes in order to learn from them. I realized that while I can analyze and correct my own errors for my own work, my students didn’t know how to! I needed to actively teach them how to look at their work and understand their mistakes.
So I started a new classroom routine. I call it “exit ticket analysis”. Each day, after our warm-up questions, I pass back our exit ticket analysis page and each student’s exit ticket from the last class. We review what our learning target and success criteria were for the last lesson, and students assess if they met that goal or not. We talk about each question and students correct their work on the exit ticket analysis page.
This idea is not new, but I couldn’t find any kind of organizer that fit exactly what I wanted. I created a template with my students in mind. I looked at a lot of examples that had a lot of “types” of errors. Some organizers only had one or two error types, others had up to six or seven! I see four main mistakes in my exit tickets that I wanted to draw my student’s attention to.
The first type of error is a frustrating one! Math Fact Errors are when students miscount a fact within a problem, so their whole answer is wrong! When I look at exit tickets, I can see that students are understanding the concept and give them partial credit. However, on a state or district test, students are not getting partial credit if they are off in one place! Students need to learn to recognize these mistakes and fix them before turning anything in. More often than not, my students are shocked at what they wrote down!
The next type of error is what I call an “attention error”. This is when a student knows what to do, but isn’t paying attention and reverts to a lazy strategy or makes a lazy mistake. This type of error can be confused with a “concept error”, so we have to be careful when we are reviewing this type of mistake. Students may look at these types of mistakes and say “what was I thinking?!” because they know better!
As a middle school teacher, I see another type of error all the time – one I lovingly call a “sloppy error”. This type of error is when a student is writing their work and it’s so sloppy, they misread their own handwriting! Recognizing this kind of error has been a big eye-opener for a few of my students!
The type of error that I don’t mind seeing is what I call a concept error. This is when a student shows a mistake in understanding the concept. I love this error because it is something I can help teach and fix, instead of the other mistakes listed that are things that the students need to pay more attention to. These mistakes are still important to review with students, so they know and understand what they need to learn and practice!
I have only used this strategy with my students for a few weeks, but they are doing a great job with recognizing their error types and correcting them! Now, we are focusing on correcting those mistakes BEFORE we turn our papers in…
Do you use an error analysis routine in your classroom? Let me know in the comments!
