Teachers must actively encourage their students to make mistakes, they must foster a safe and secure environment in which falling over is not only accepted without criticism or humiliation, but in which it is actively encouraged as evidence of effective learning and of getting better at something.
Every teacher knows that some students do not raise their hands in class to answer a question because they fear they will be criticised or made to feel embarrassed for being wrong. And yet the opposite should be true: students should be eager to raise their hands because to get an answer wrong is to learn from their mistakes; to get an answer wrong is to learn the correct answer.
Equally, raising a hand to say, “I don’t understand this ... can you help?” is not a sign of weakness or low intelligence, it is a means of increasing one’s intelligence.
Of course, making a mistake – even if you have a positive mindset – can be a painful experience. But a mistake shouldn’t define you; it’s a problem to be faced and learnt from. We teach this by modelling it, by publicly making mistakes and by making explicit our own implicit learning.