Whoops, My Mistake – Times When I’ve Been Wrong And The Experience Taught Me
Strong and effective leadership often means setting a great example – but sometimes you’ll need to learn to teach from your failures, no matter how cringe-worthy they might be, says Mary Myatt…
- by Mary Myatt
“If you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not doing anything. I’m positive that a doer makes mistakes.”
I used this quote from legendary college basketball coach John Wooden as the starting point for one of the chapters in my book, High Challenge, Low Threat, when talking about making errors. In this section I write:
‘Oh the agony of making a mistake. We feel embarrassed, incompetent and we sometimes feel we have let ourselves and others down. But in the right conditions, where challenge is matched by low threat, most mistakes are seen as drivers for new learning and improvement.’
So, here – ever-ready to take a dose of my own medicine – I thought I’d share with you some buttock-clenchingly embarrassing mistakes I’ve made, and what I’ve learned from them…
The teaching trial
The first was over 10 years ago. I had recently joined my local authority as a school improvement adviser and was doing some work on developing the curriculum with a school. This took place over a number of weeks, working with teachers and the faculty leader. The job was to collaborate with colleagues, to give the schemes of work more ‘bite’ for students.
They had identified that some lessons were lacklustre, and that the teachers weren’t excited or interested in the material. This, in turn, was turning students off. We worked on this together, and keen to see what it might look like in practice, they asked if I would be prepared to do a trial lesson. I happily agreed. Why wouldn’t I? I love teaching and working with new groups of students, so I was looking forward to giving it a go. The teachers would be watching. All four of them. Last thing on a Friday afternoon.
We wanted the students to look at photos in a geography lesson and speculate about what might be happening. Their questions would then link to the intended plan for the lesson. This required students to pay attention, come up with their own responses and listen carefully to others.
But they were not bothered – and not only did they not engage with the material, they instead started their own conversations. The big mistake was that I didn’t know their names, which meant that a crucial link in my communication with them was missing.
I persevered to the end, and a few came on board, but it was a flop – and it felt agonising. Not only had I not moved anyone’s practice forward, this group was worse behaved than before I started the work. What was interesting was that the colleagues watching me appeared relieved, with the head of the faculty suppressing a grin. It couldn’t have been worse. I left and had a miserable weekend. Not just from letting myself down, but also the reputation of the LA. I was due to go in the following week for a debrief, and what happened was fascinating. First of all, I apologised not only for a rubbish lesson, but for messing up their routine. However, their response was the opposite of what I’d expected. Instead of blaming me and laughing – which I thought I fully deserved – they were full of praise. “Why?” I asked.
“Well, for starters, you were prepared to model what we had been working on. Second, you were prepared to do it with us watching you. And finally, you’ve come back to try again. We really respect you for that.”
The takeaway What I learned from this is that being prepared to take a risk, and for it to go wrong, is not the end of the world. It may have felt like it over that miserable weekend, but in terms of building trust with colleagues, the opposite was true.
Over the next few weeks, I worked with them to refine the schemes and to do more teaching. It wasn’t great straight away, but it improved over time. It was a slog, and it wasn’t pretty, but in the end the students understood what we were trying to do, and they came to have a deeper understanding of geographic concepts.
I quite often refer to this episode in my professional career when I am speaking and working elsewhere, but only when I think it will be received in the right spirit. What I am doing when recounting this embarrassing episode is stressing that it wasn’t the end of my professional career, and that even reasonably competent people can get it wrong and live to tell the tale.
I am eternally grateful to those colleagues who watched me fail for the fact that they didn’t gloat, but instead took heart from someone struggling with a challenging group.
Humble pie
The second relates to a more recent experience. I was working in a school during an inspection and was going through some of its data with one of the senior leaders. We were coming to different conclusions about what the information was saying about students’ progress – partly due to the way in which the information was presented, which needed close reading in order to come to any conclusion at all.
We left it at that point, deciding that it needed more work and going through in detail. But later that day, when carefully looking over how the school was both gathering and interpreting the information, I realised that he was right. So when I saw him the next morning, I told him so right away. It wasn’t a mistake on my part, as such; more that the data needed careful analysis in a quiet space. The takeaway The learning point here was not to take things at face value; to go away and think and unpick the numbers further. And also the importance of saying, face to face, with his CEO in attendance, that his interpretation was correct.
I try to work to the principle that school leaders know their contexts better than any visitor, and that they are right to argue their case. What follows from this is that if I’m barking up the wrong tree, they have every right to say so. The biggest takeaway from this episode was that by unequivocally saying upfront that my original interpretation was wrong, a greater trust was developed going forward as we worked on the rest of the inspection.
Additional problems
A lesson in making sure your context is absolutely clear when using social media…
Last year I was at a national RE conference where all costs were met by Culham St Gabriel’s – a trust that funds development in religious education. Over 200 teachers came together for the weekend to share ideas, hear about the latest thinking and strategy in the field and to enjoy one another’s company. I was sitting in on one of the sessions when one of the delegates said, “You wouldn’t get maths teachers together like this on a Saturday.” Knowing she meant that other curriculum areas were unlikely to have this level of funding to enable so many educators to come together, at no charge to them or their schools, I tweeted this comment. However, that’s not how maths teachers on Twitter saw it. Responses were robust. How dare Mary say that maths colleagues don’t go to conferences at the weekend, don’t do additional work in their own time or go the extra mile for their subject and their students? I spent the rest of the day responding to the outrage, apologising for the clumsy tweet.
Red-faced memo to self – delete offending tweet as soon as the first responses come through. By the end of that day, I was thoroughly apologised out…
Mary Myatt is an adviser, writer and teacher training specialist, regularly visiting schools across the country; her latest book, High Challenge, Low Threat, is published by John Catt Educational
For more information, visit www.marymyatt.com or follow @MaryMyatt
