The Importance of Miscommunication in Teaching and Learning

Communication of new ideas, even mundane ones like direction, depends on guesswork. There is no fallible means of transmission between what you know and what the other person is trying to understand. And so quite often what happens is miscommunication. We are taught that error is a bad thing, or that error is somehow something that deserves to be reprimanded. But when genuine efforts are made on the part of someone trying to learn something, and they fail at that, it's a necessary part of the learning process.