How to stop fearing mistakes and start celebrating them | Hannah Sabo | TEDxBodø

Quick Overview

Hannah Sabo transforms the fear of making mistakes into an asset by reframing them as seeds for growth or bugs requiring debugging, a perspective she developed after struggling with physics and later teaching it, ultimately concluding that how we frame and react to mistakes determines whether we stop trying or gain deeper understanding.

Key Points: Hannah Sabo initially feared making mistakes in college physics, which caused her to lose confidence and become scared to share her ideas, despite eventually earning a physics degree and PhD. As a teaching assistant, Sabo realized that curriculum designers intentionally drew out common student misconceptions, viewing correcting mistakes as an "expected natural part of the learning process." Students often felt they could not trust their intuition in physics because their real-world experience (like predicting a bowling ball lands first) conflicted with simplified physics models (where objects land simultaneously without air resistance). The instructor challenged Sabo to find the "kernel of correctness" in incorrect student ideas, leading Sabo to realize that "ideas could be seeds. Mistakes could be seeds. It would just take time to grow and nurture them." In computer programming, mistakes manifest as bugs, and the process of debugging—reproducing the error, investigating, and trying new fixes—is expected and viewed as a learning opportunity. Sabo advocates that when a mistake occurs, individuals should ask, "What's going on here? Why did this happen? We get reflective and we get creative. We fix it and we move on."

Context: Hannah Sabo recounts her personal journey from being terrified of making mistakes in her initial college physics course to becoming a PhD in physics education research, driven by the realization that mistakes are crucial for learning. Her experience teaching physics revealed that students often distrust their intuition because the simplified models taught in physics conflict with their everyday observations, prompting a shift in her pedagogical approach toward nurturing misconceptions rather than simply replacing them.