Teaching Humanity Remotely with Dr. Mindy Show – Podcast Ep 24

In this latest podcast episode, the 24^th in this series, the discussion continues to focus on the central theme of my latest book project.  As you probably know if you’ve been following my podcasts and blogs that I recently assembled and published my first book designed FOR PARENTS. The book is called I LIKE HOW YOU SPEAK TO ME… A PARENT’S GUIDE FOR EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION WITH CHILDREN. The book is a prescriptive “how to” for parents, family members or teachers to have a clear path to effective communication with children.

The book is divided into three sections, and the first section of the book forms the backbone of this parenting guide … it’s my “10 Governing Principles” for communicating with children, and for the last number of weeks on my podcasts I have been taking a deeper dive into each of those ten guiding principles, one at a time, podcast after podcast. This podcast contains the SIXTH discussion in that series, and the sixth governing principle that I see as essential for communicating with children is DON’T BE AFRAID TO MODEL MAKING MISTAKES.

I have always held the believe that the mistake is one of the most essential components of learning.  It is in the mistake that the learning opportunity arises.  So many parents and educators focus on the incorrectness of the mistake and not on the invitation to figure out what is correct. As a result, children often feel shame about making a mistake and too much attention and focus is spent on eradicating the mistake instead of using it to move learning in the right direction. When I was a teacher, we hardly ever encouraged the use of erasers in my classroom for that very reason. Children generally do not enough attention to both spend energy on erasing something and also move ahead with the learning lesson, so we didn’t focus on the erasing, just on the learning.

In this podcast I also shared my long-time analogy of what actors go through when making a movie.  A mis-take results in a re-take, and in the performing the re-take, there is the opportunity to edit and improve upon the performance. Whether it’s the classroom or a movie set, it is in the mis-take that the learning occurs, and therefore we should eliminated the shame associated with a mistake and celebrate the mistake for the learning opportunity it invites.  Parents and teachers can accomplish a great deal by pointing out their own mistakes in a light-hearted manner… by modeling making a mistake, children will feel that a weight is lifted when they make a mistake and then be open to learning.

This podcast concludes with a recap of the structure of my new book on parenting and how the 10 Governing Principles for effective communication with children are all inter-woven.

You can find my new parenting book here:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08WJRX7JF

The next podcast will focus on the seventh governing principle from my new book for parents, so please stay tuned for that. Thanks for visiting and for listening.  You can hear Podcast 24 here:

https://learnwithmeremotely.podbean.com/e/teaching-humanity-remotely-with-dr-mindy-shaw-ep-24/