Lauren Shaffer, OWLA Executive Recorder & Editor of The Cardinal
Spanish Teacher, Dalton High School

My first grader recently came home from school with a handwritten list of her favorite zoo animals. She proudly informed me that she wrote the list all by herself, without any help from her teacher. Before I explain why her list inspired me to write this article, let’s take a quick quiz. How many of the animal words from her list can you decode?

Answers:
capybaras
tigers
lions
ducks
sloths
otters
penguins
fish

Of the eight words, she only spelled one correctly, and yet I was so proud of her list. A year ago, she could not have written any of these words on her own. Now she was sounding them out, applying the rules she had learned, and was actually able to write something that could be understood. And while she made many errors, most of them were not random; they showed sound thinking based on what she had learned.

I shared this list with my students, partly because they love hearing about my daughter, but mainly because it demonstrated an important point: errors are evidence of learning. When I asked them if they looked at her work and thought, “Wow, your kid is a terrible speller!” or “Wow, look at how well she’s doing!” they all agreed with the latter. Then I asked them if they thought it was possible for a child to skip this stage of writing, and simply become a perfect speller after the first time they are taught. No one did. Framing it this way helped them understand that errors are just part of the process, and that none of us are immune to them.

While this was a lesson I wanted to teach my students, it’s also one I have to remember myself. I sometimes look at my students’ mistakes and wonder where I went wrong: Didn’t I tell them this? Haven’t they seen this structure a thousand times? But I’m sure my daughter was taught that the “sh” sound in fish is spelled s-h and not h-s, and yet her list still says fihs. Do I think she’ll spell it that way forever? Absolutely not. With time and practice, it will work itself out, and I’m confident that eventually she will become a perfectly competent speller.

When I look at my students’ work, I want to see it the same way I saw my daughter’s list: not as evidence of failure, but as evidence of learning. Normalizing errors means helping my students see their own work this way, too. Students who are afraid to make mistakes play it safe and stick with what they already know. Students who aren’t afraid to be wrong are more willing to take risks with the language, opening the door to even more growth.

My daughter will continue to misspell words for a while, and I’ll keep being proud of her work. Our students deserve that same pride.

So let’s celebrate the errors, because without them, language learning can’t happen.