5314: Making Mistakes Meaningful for Students AND Teachers

Speaker: Julie Kuntz, Professional Learning Specialist

Julie Kuntz: Hi, my name is Julie Kuntz and I'm one of the course designers for the course 5314: Making Mistakes Meaningful for Teachers and Students. Something I hope teachers take away from this course is an opportunity to reflect both personally and professionally about our relationship with mistakes and failure. I think it's something we encourage students to do. We say things like mistakes are how we grow and mistakes are how we learn. But when it comes down to it, as teachers, I don't think we're given much space or grace to make those mistakes and to learn from them. So this course really provides opportunities not only to provide support and resources for your students, but to also delve into your own values and beliefs and perspectives around mistakes and to really start celebrating them and learning to embrace them instead of fearing them.

Julie Kuntz: My favorite thing about this course is that each of the applications offer options for teachers to either reflect inwardly on themselves and their own thinking about failures and mistakes and opportunities to think outward and develop and implement and create lesson plans and activities for students. So this is a great course for you to do personal reflection and focus on the self. We know that when we focus on ourselves, we can become more present, more aware for our students. But there's also opportunities to develop curriculum for your students as well. The other thing I love about this course is this gorgeous text which the course is based on 'Risk. Fail. Rise.' by M Colleen Cruz. It's a beautiful text and a beautiful testament to failures and mistakes. And I'm hoping that teachers really enjoy reading and delving into this as much as I did.