Activity: Mistake-Friendly Art

Bob Ross would give this creative activity his full stamp of approval. "There are no mistakes - only happy accidents."

Young kids don't worry about looking bad at something. They don't care if they have one sock on while they share a story they just wrote. And they didn't even write the story, they're just pretend-reading an upside magazine from the recycling bin. Do they care? No. They're caught up in the moment of the performance, the art-making, the joy of being center-stage.

Somewhere along the way, we lose that pure relationship to creativity and discovery. We start worrying that we're doing it wrong, that people will laugh at us, or that our painting is the worst one in the whole class. We become the meanest of mean critics. And you know what happens next? We shut down learning because we might make a mistake.

We see this in schools every day. It partially explains the achievement gap between girls and boys in S.T.E.M. classes. In the research, boys seem less concerned about the perception that they might make a mistake than girls. Consider this fascinating finding about high-stakes learning from a recent research study:

Pressure, particularly when experienced during instruction, reduced learning among girls. In contrast, boys trended toward enhanced learning under pressure. In the absence of pressure, girls exhibited strikingly larger gains in learning.

Mistake Tolerance

Since we can't always operate in low-pressure situations, we have to get better at mistake tolerance. We can learn how to accept being unskilled at something while we skill-build. We can expect to make mistakes and forgive ourselves when we do. We can be the guy with one sock on learning the power of effective public speaking. Sure that guy is making a few newbie mistakes. I mean, he's holding the magazine upside down - but it's a starting place right?

How to get mistake friendly (share it with an error-avoidant kid in your house):