Theory:
Catching your own errors is hard. It’s helpful (and more fun) to practice catching someone else’s errors. (Especially the teacher’s) (Also, to do it, you have to pay close attention to the correct method)
In practice:
Do the worksheet you would have given your students… badly. (I usually aim for about a 50/50 error rate.) Plan your errors for the kind your students are mostly likely to make. (I’ll be forgetting to treat both sides of an equation equally, and reversing operations this week)
Give students the error-filled page(s) and a red pen. Their assignment: correct your work.
But not just correct it, give the kind of detailed feedback that would help this poor struggling teacher student learn. I ask my students to:
-Mark each question right/wrong
-Circle the specific error
-Write the correct method
-At the end of the worksheet, write a note with the reminders this student might need. (The notes are really sweet, I hope they talk to themselves as encouragingly as they write)
((Bonus, they will now appreciate how much work grading/your job is))
Easily adapted to: Just about any topic. In my experience, it works best with multistep calculation tasks where procedure/precision matter.
Resource: Algebra by Example (Example-based problem sets, many of them correcting an error)
