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7th Apr 2025
We often tell pupils that mistakes are part of learning — but what if we designed lessons to depend on them?“ Learning traps,” deliberate set-ups that help students learn through their mistakes, are not about tricking them but about crafting situations where getting it wrong becomes the most powerful route to getting it right. They expose faulty reasoning, common misconceptions, or surface-level thinking to deepen understanding. It’s a strategy as old as Socratic dialogue and as sharp as a well-set maths problem. And the evidence supports it. In this blog, you’ll discover five practical types of learning traps — from the ‘almost-right answer’ to the ‘fake success’ trap — each illustrated with classroom examples across subjects. You’ll also find guidance on how to use traps responsibly, along with references to key research on productive failure, retrieval, and metacognitive development.
