Tools to Build Their Best Learning: Examining How Kindergarten Teachers Frame Student Mistakes

In this portrait, Maleka Donaldson vividly illustrates how two teachers in real-world, public school settings convey their expectations for kindergarten student performance and set the tone for learning from mistakes and feedback. Research in psychology and education has established the benefits of corrective feedback on learning but has not closely examined how practicing teachers respond to mistakes made by young children during day-to-day instruction. Donaldson draws on extended observations of teacher-student interactions to juxtapose the two contexts and reveal divergent techniques that the participating teachers use to frame mistakes and correct answers during instruction. She compares these variations and considers how each teacher's pedagogical tools could be integrated into a mistake-response toolkit that could fundamentally reshape learning from mistakes for kindergarteners.