6 Common Teacher Mistakes—and How to Avoid Them

Several years ago, I was teaching and grew impatient with a girl who never participated in class, even when I tried methods like warm calling and using jokes to lighten the mood. After class one day, I went up to her and vented my frustration. “What is the issue here?” I asked. “Am I doing something wrong?” Her response floored me: “Yes. You’re mean.”

I was hurt but pressed her to explain. As it turned out, my attempts to joke around had been misinterpreted, and she thought I was trying to be mean. I apologized and explained my intent, and we began to work toward a much more productive relationship. While I will never remember this conversation fondly, I’m grateful for it because it changed my tendency to make assumptions about how students feel and helped me realize that what I intend as encouraging or helpful might land in a totally different way. 

As the saying goes, the person who never makes mistakes never makes anything. While teachers try to reframe them for students through a growth mindset lens, it’s harder to apply that same thinking to ourselves. But teachers do make errors, and they often follow familiar patterns. Those moments are often the very source of personal and professional growth.

1. We’re in a Hurry

Of all the valuable commodities that teachers lack, time is at the top of the list. Most teachers agree that there are not enough hours in the day to get everything done: instruction to plan, papers to grade, meetings to attend, absent colleagues’ classes to cover. When we’re in a hurry, we’re far more likely to complete tasks poorly or incorrectly, particularly when deadlines loom.

Physics teacher James Schafer shared an example with me. In a rush to get ready for class, he gave students a problem he had not yet done himself. When a student had a question, Schafer told me, “I rushed in explaining a concept and missed an important part of the problem. As a result, my explanation led the student to a wrong answer. The student then asked follow-up questions as I floundered to figure out where I had gone wrong.”

Schafer felt that the incident shone a spotlight on his lack of preparedness. It “forced me to go back, reread the problem, check all my assumptions, and figure out where I had gone wrong. Modeling all this for the students likely had some positive impact, but not being prepared was a mistake.”

Even when time is tight—or especially then—we all benefit from pausing to go over the content of a lesson ourselves, complete our assessment, answer unit questions, or read over the material before we teach.

2. We Lack Experience

When we’re new at doing anything, we will make mistakes—the silver lining of these early missteps is that they illuminate what to do differently next time. Given the complexity of skillful teaching, it’s almost impossible to avoid blunders early on, especially since teaching is often learned through trial by fire. For example, few people go into the profession with an understanding of how to conduct a nuanced data analysis, how to accurately pinpoint what students still need to learn, how to prioritize what is most urgent for them to learn, or how to manage classroom relationships effectively.

Veteran teacher and author Brett Vogelsinger recalls, “In my first few years, as an extroverted teacher, I mistook introversion as lack of interest or engagement.” Over time, he realized that enthusiasm can take quieter forms and began to prioritize “methods that drew out introverted students in class discussion while also affording opportunities to engage in quieter ways, to show what they are thinking, even when their enthusiasm may not shine in the ways and places I once expected it to.”

Experience can’t be rushed, but reflection accelerates it. Vogelsinger learned to ask students for feedback at the close of a marking period with a question: “There are various ways to demonstrate engagement in class. What does engagement look like for you? Include details your teacher might not observe in the classroom.”

Teachers who build habits around reflection and who invite student feedback are more likely to catch novice mistakes early and turn them into growth. Asking for feedback from both colleagues and students on a consistent basis can ease the process of learning what works best and what might not be as helpful.

3. We Make Assumptions

Veteran teachers have learned a lot from our earlier mistakes, but sometimes expertise can actually work against us. Teachers who have been around the block are prone to prediction error, which is what happens when the outcome we expect based on prior experience differs from what actually occurs. High school teacher Kurt Wachowski has been in the classroom for 19 years, but a challenging experience gave him pause.

“I found out that a couple students in one of my sections had taken it upon themselves to consume materials for a gingerbread house that was supposed to be for a homeroom competition,” he said. “I naturally made some assumptions about the potential guilty parties, as well as their intent for doing this. Then, when I asked them to come forward, it was a group of students whom I didn’t expect, and they had done this out of a misunderstanding rather than ill-intent.” Even though he didn’t make any direct accusations, Wachowski felt terrible about his assumption.

We all have confirmation bias—a tendency to pay most attention to information that confirms our opinions or beliefs—so when incidents like Wachowski’s occur, it helps to consciously note that our assumptions can be wrong. Again, that’s the value of reflection. Years of teaching won’t prevent missteps, but they can help people embrace vulnerability, and a teacher who admits mistakes shows students that reflection and empathy matter more than being right.

4. Good Intentions Backfire

Every adult in a school building shares common goals, such as encouraging student growth, but sometimes, in our efforts to be encouraging and make students comfortable, we unintentionally achieve the opposite. In her second year of teaching, Minnesota educator Heather Culli was trying to be encouraging when one of her students shared excitement about visiting her incarcerated mother for the first time in a while: “I bet you’re going to give her a great, big hug. Aren’t you?” The student’s response was immediately humbling: “No, Mrs. Culli. There’s a window there and she’s on the other side of it.”

Culli realized that it was her desire “to fix and solve, rather than be present and meet her where she was, that made me bulldoze past active listening.” She worked to “unlearn” the impulse to save her students from discomfort and create spaces where she listened fully before responding. Good intentions aside, we can resist the urge to jump in to try and fix things too quickly, and focus instead on being present, which builds trust more than quick reassurance ever can.

Another teacher I spoke to shared a poignant example of good intentions gone wrong: “There was a student who had a lot going on outside of school, and I could see the exhaustion in their posture and the way they avoided eye contact. I decided not to call on them during discussions and to let them put their head down if they looked tired. I also started giving partial credit if they turned in work late or incomplete.”

Over the next few weeks, the teacher realized the negative impact of these shifts as the student participated less and less and fell further behind. After apologizing to the student for unintentionally conveying a lack of belief in their capability, the teacher applied a new strategy, with “shorter chunks of work, quick check-ins, and options for how to participate like writing first, then sharing, or answering one question instead of three.”

5. We Misjudge Students’ Readiness for a Task

Working with students includes a natural level of unpredictability, and it’s not uncommon to misjudge how they will react to assignments or lessons. Even the best-laid plans go awry, which is what Meg Knudsen-Gleason, an educator for 30 years, means when she describes teaching as “a cycle of trial and error.” She recalls that one year, “I really wanted my students to have complete freedom in choosing their topics. My intention was that they would choose a topic that they were deeply connected to.” Unfortunately, many of her sixth graders were intimidated and struggled—they weren’t prepared for that degree of autonomy.

This lapse in judgment led to an important realization: “It taught me a huge lesson about how to present something to students that appears like you’re giving them the freedom they so crave but aligning it with the goals or outcomes you have.”

Misjudging how students will approach an assignment teaches us to calibrate tasks by offering choice where possible within structure—balancing freedom with clear parameters. Ultimately, if a class is not responding well to the work we assign, considering a different approach to achieve the same learning goal can help students understand what we expect of them.

6. We Repeat the Past

Sometimes our habits trace back to our own school experiences, whether we enjoyed them or not. Nearly every adult of a certain age can recall a time when lecturing through an entire class period was the norm—not what most of us would consider ideal for students today. Retired teacher Cindy Hallman recalls, “I began teaching second graders the way I had been taught, almost a drill-and-kill method.” After several years, she realized that her students struggled to recall prior lessons—and that memorizing facts without context might work in the short term but ultimately was “not learning for retention of knowledge.”

Hallman shifted her approach, emphasizing metacognition so students could think about their own thinking. Recognizing patterns from our past and intentionally breaking them opens new possibilities:

• Helping disruptive students contribute meaningfully by assigning classroom roles
• Prioritizing depth over breadth to focus on essential understanding
• Replacing extended teacher talk with quick peer discussions
• Using ongoing formative checks rather than relying solely on final assessments

Our teacher mistakes remind us that learning never stops. As Schafer says, “When I make mistakes, I own them. If I mispronounce a student name, I apologize and ask to be corrected. If I make a mistake in a calculation, I acknowledge it, explain where I made my mistake, and show the students how to fix it. If I get a fact wrong and a student corrects it, I thank them and let them know that I learned something. There isn’t shame in making mistakes. There is shame in trying to pretend that perfection exists.”