by Mrs Sarah Bakhtiari, Principal of Shoreham College
I change my mind quite a lot. This may not be the most reassuring opening sentence from a head teacher. But there is something rather important about being able to say: I thought this, I have learned something new, and now I think differently.
A decision should be the best one I can make with the information I have at the time. If better information arrives, stubbornly sticking with the original decision simply for the sake of consistency doesn’t make it a better decision.
And yet changing our minds can be surprisingly uncomfortable.
Most of us know the particular discomfort of discovering that something we have said with great confidence is completely wrong. Perhaps you have insisted that the car was parked on the third floor when it was, in fact, on the fourth. Perhaps you have spent ten minutes explaining why something cannot possibly work, shortly before someone demonstrates that it can.
There is a tiny moment in which we have a choice. We can defend ourselves, explain why we were almost right, subtly change what we originally claimed, or simply say, “Oh. I was wrong.”
I am increasingly interested in that moment.
Being wrong is an unavoidable part of being human. We misunderstand people, remember things incorrectly and make decisions without knowing everything we will later know. The problem is that we often treat being wrong as something to be embarrassed about rather than something useful.
Children learn this very early. Put your hand up in class with the right answer and there is an immediate little reward: well done. Give the wrong answer and, however skillfully a teacher handles it, there can still be that sinking feeling of having got it wrong in public.
Of course, knowledge matters. Seven times eight really is 56, regardless of how passionately I might argue otherwise. But learning depends upon getting things wrong. If children only attempt things they already know how to do, very little learning is taking place.
A crossed-out answer can therefore be genuinely interesting. It shows us where a child started and how their thinking changed. Sometimes the mistake is the most revealing part of the learning.
The same is true beyond the classroom. We want children to develop opinions, question what they hear, examine evidence and reach conclusions for themselves. But there is another skill that matters just as much: knowing when the evidence means that the conclusion needs to change. That requires more than critical thinking. It requires enough resilience to change your mind when the evidence asks you to.
I know how difficult that can be. Quite often, I will have thought something through, considered the options, reached what seems to me to be an entirely sensible conclusion and announced it to other people.
And then somebody says, “Have you thought about…?”
And sometimes I haven’t.
Then comes the choice. Defend the decision I have expressed, or accept that the new information has changed things.
I would love to tell you that I always embrace the latter with intellectual delight. I don’t. Sometimes becoming better informed is deeply inconvenient. But it is still better than being confidently wrong, and so I reserve the right to become better informed.
Sometimes that means changing my mind. Perhaps we should celebrate when our children do the same. Instead of asking whether they got something right, let’s be interested in what made them think again. The crossed-out calculation, the rewritten paragraph, the opinion that shifted after a conversation with somebody else: these are not necessarily signs that the first attempt failed. Sometimes they are evidence that something happened between the first thought and the second. And that something is learning.
I hope the young people we educate leave school knowing lots of things. But I also hope they leave curious enough to question some of those things, confident enough to form their own opinions and secure enough to change them. There will be plenty of occasions in their lives when they are wrong. There certainly have been in mine. The important thing is what happens next.
Shoreham College, like many independent schools, has been offering continuity of education for its pupils and their families for generations. Established in 1842, as a grammar school, where pupils were “liberally boarded and carefully educated.” Shoreham College is proud of its traditions and proud of the many and varied achievements of pupils. Whilst the Shoreham College of today is most definitely a day school, the forward thinking liberal culture of its founders continues to resonate.
www.shorehamcollege.co.uk
