The Power of the Socratic Classroom

Mistakes and Insights

As someone who loves language, I often anagram or rearrange the letters of words to see what creative insights I can discover. It's a tremendously powerful creative thinking tool that I would recommend to anyone. The word 'mistakes' has some fantastic anagrams that provide insights into how we can think about making them. For starters, 'mistakes' anagrams to 'As Kismet,' meaning we are destined to make them. It's so simple that we may forget we are always making mistakes... but how we deal with them is up to us. 'Mistakes' also anagrams to 'Ask Times,' meaning that mistakes are simply times where we need to formulate questions. That's it. Instead of getting frustrated we can simply shift into questioner mode and get curious. Another fun anagram is 'Team K.I.S.S.' This has all sorts of possibilities because of the acronym, but I would suggest: "Team Keep It Simple and Serendipitous." Teach students that mistakes are great teachers that can put us in the right mindset to truly learn what we were just struggling with.