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When Disneyland opened in 1955, it was a disaster. Although 15,000 visitors were expected, nearly twice as many descended upon the park, thanks to thousands of counterfeit tickets. Guests were plagued by long lines, malfunctioning rides, and a shortage of food. To top it all off, a tiger and a panther escaped from the circus, terrifying children and parents on Disney鈥檚 suddenly family-unfriendly Main Street.

The day having been dubbed 鈥溾�� by his employees, Walt Disney took it all in stride. 鈥淚f you do big things, you make big mistakes,鈥� he told reporters.

For Disney, creativity and mistakes went hand in hand. As the founder of a company that offered fantasy as its core product, he encouraged his team of engineers, designers, and mechanics鈥攜ou may know them as Imagineers鈥攖o think expansively and be willing to break things. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 remember anyone getting fired for coming up with a dumb idea or making a mistake,鈥� Van Arsdale France, one of Disney鈥檚 earliest employees.

Yet all too often, students see mistakes as a source of embarrassment, stress, or even humiliation. The human brain is agnostic, however, and makes good use of the data鈥攎istakes are crucial pieces of information that force a cognitive reckoning, pushing the brain to reconcile contradictory information and build more accurate, durable solutions.

Recent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies reveal the underlying neural machinery at work. In a , neuroscientists at Caltech discovered that mistakes set off an almost instantaneous chain reaction of productive brain activity. Even before the conscious mind is aware of the error, the researchers found, one set of neurons鈥攃alled 鈥渆rror neurons,鈥� the neural forerunners of mistakes鈥攂egin to fire. Fifty milliseconds later, a phalanx of 鈥渃onflict neurons鈥� respond, signaling the effort to resolve inconsistent pieces of information. In rapid-fire succession, the brain of a person making an error lights up with the kind of activity that encodes information more deeply.

While no one likes to commit mistakes, especially publicly, it鈥檚 in the best interests of schools, teachers, and students to make peace with them鈥攐r even welcome them. As Carol Dweck, professor of psychology at Stanford University and the author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, explains succinctly: 鈥淓very time a student makes a mistake... they grow a synapse.鈥�

Creating a mistake-friendly classroom will not only help your students develop the skills necessary for future success, but it'll also encourage them to have a healthy mindset that accepts鈥攁nd learns from鈥攆ailure. Here are six classroom strategies to make that a reality.

Acknowledge That the Fear Is Real

The fear of failure is deep-seated. Researchers know that when students with math anxiety encounter numbers, for example, 鈥渁 fear center in the brain is activated鈥攖he same fear center that lights up when people see snakes or spiders,鈥� writes Stanford professor Jo Boaler in her 2019 book, .

The fear of being outed as incompetent can lead to a downward spiral of inadequacy, nervous fretting, and further mistakes. 鈥淎s the fear center of the brain becomes activated, activity in the problem-solving centers of the brain is diminished,鈥� explains Boaler, describing a process that shuts down the very cognitive apparatus needed to demonstrate competency.

To overcome fear in our classrooms, we have to identify and actively replace the destructive thoughts. If we're anxious about making a public error, for example, then聽"we have to聽learn to replace the thought 鈥業鈥檓 stupid鈥� with another thought, which is 鈥業鈥檓 learning,鈥欌�� asserted the psychologist, researcher, and author Angela Duckworth in our recent interview.

Work in the Zone of Proximal Development

Getting answers right doesn鈥檛 necessarily reflect authentic, long-term learning. In a , professor of learning sciences Manu Kapur asked seventh-grade students to solve challenging math problems鈥攐nes that were more difficult than what they鈥檇 find on a typical exam but not so challenging that they gave up. A good problem, according to Kapur, is not one that has a single correct answer; it is open-ended so that students explore a multitude of possibilities, drawing on and making connections with prior knowledge. At the end of the school year, these students outperformed their peers in their math class, Kapur found.

When a problem is easy, Kapur says, students can immediately recall the correct answer. But when a problem is challenging, students are forced to evaluate several possible answers, helping them 鈥渂etter discern and understand those very concepts, representations, and methods.鈥� Flirting with failure, it turns out, helps students determine not only why certain answers are correct, but also how and why others are incorrect, deepening their grasp of the topic.

Tap Into Passion and Curiosity

Any exploration into the unknown, whether it鈥檚 visiting a new country or sampling unfamiliar foods, primes the brain to accept uncertainty, and a reveals a key reason why: The areas of the brain that are active when people confront new ideas or face creative challenges聽also light up when they take calculated risks. These findings follow a showing that intrinsic curiosity鈥攁 good proxy for student passion鈥攊ncreases a person鈥檚 tolerance for uncertainty.

So if you want students to have a positive attitude toward mistakes, consider conducting surveys or adopting other get-to-know-you activities that provide insights into student interests, and then integrate those interests into lesson planning. And be sure to give students a broader range of choices when you hand out new assignments. When students work on things they鈥檙e passionate about, they are far more likely to tolerate, and work their way through, the unavoidable battery of mistakes and misfires.

Actively Model Mistakes

In a , researchers studied how math teachers in China and the United States responded to mistakes in the classroom, and they discovered that U.S. teachers frequently corrected their students when they had an incorrect answer, an approach that 鈥渃ould lead students to become afraid to make mistakes for fear of being seen as stupid.鈥�

The Chinese teachers, on the other hand, 鈥渨ere more open with their students than the U.S. teachers about the freedom to make errors,鈥� which helped to create a mistake-friendly classroom environment. Promoting the idea that 鈥渆rrors are commonplace鈥攁nd some are even good鈥� led to students鈥� more frequently correcting their own mistakes.

To create a culture of true openness to mistakes, teachers must not only embrace student error but actively model their own tolerance for it. Renowned writing teacher Kelly Gallagher, author of Readicide, believes that teachers should regularly write in front of their class. 鈥淭he teacher is the best writer in the room; therefore, it is critical that the best writer in the room models the confusion, the messiness, the stopping and starting, the hesitation that comes with trying to compose,鈥� Gallagher. 鈥淚 do not try to hide this; on the contrary, I want my students to see that I, too, wrestle with getting words down on paper.鈥�

Encourage 鈥楻ough-Draft Thinking鈥�

Telling students, 鈥淭his is just your rough-draft thinking right now鈥� gives them permission to ask questions, make mistakes, and then revise without the stifling prospect of failure, explains math professor Amanda Jansen and her colleagues in a .

Explicitly labeling activities across the curriculum, from writing to drawing to science, as 鈥渞ough-drafting thinking鈥� fosters a culture of intellectual risk-taking and gives students an opportunity to sketch initial solutions without worrying about being right or wrong. To encourage 鈥渞ough-draft talk,鈥� the verbalization of rough-draft thinking, teachers can highlight the idea that learning takes time and that it鈥檚 beneficial to talk through ideas that aren鈥檛 fully formed in small groups. 鈥淚 like it even when I鈥檓 wrong, because I learn from my group and get better,鈥� a middle school math student.

Grade Fewer Things

The expectation that all student work needs to be closely monitored or even graded by a teacher remains one of the largest obstacles to innovation and true productivity in classrooms.

鈥淭he time and energy spent on grading has been often pinpointed as a key barrier to instructors becoming more innovative in their teaching,鈥� write Jeffrey Schinske and Kimberly Tanner in a , adding that 鈥渏ust because students generate work does not mean instructors need to grade that work for accuracy.鈥�

Correcting every mistake in the classroom can be stifling, not only for students but for the teacher as well. Giving yourself permission to grade fewer assignments or share feedback responsibilities with students鈥攃ommon strategies are the one-in-four rule and peer-to-peer grading using distributed rubrics鈥攚ill not only free up hours each week for more teacher planning, but is also essential to the creation of a low-stress classroom environment where students are encouraged to experiment, take risks, and produce a greater volume of high-quality work.