Being a teacher means thinking about education every day. The other day, I watched my nephew trying to beat a level in a video game. He’d make a mistake, try again, make another mistake, and keep trying. He was focused, determined, and fully engaged in that challenge. Finally, he figured out the right move and moved on.

I asked, “Why don’t you do that at school?”
The answer came quickly: “At school, we’re not allowed to make mistakes.”

This is a snapshot of a major problem in education: students don’t understand the journey they’re on. And, worse still, they learn that making mistakes means failing, when in fact it’s an essential part of learning.

We’ve started talking more about filling in learning gaps during the pandemic, but this need didn’t arise then. As far back as the 1990s, I was already encountering students in advanced grades who were struggling with basic content from earlier grades. Without technology, I would jot down the student’s difficulties on index cards and work on the areas they needed to catch up on.

The pandemic has merely amplified and laid bare a reality that already existed. The learning gap is not a consequence of the pandemic, but of an educational model that has failed to keep pace with students and has come to operate out of touch with their reality.

Even today, we still find high school students—and even college students—who struggle with literacy or basic skills typically learned in the early grades. This is not because they are incapable, but because the system failed to identify, assess, and address their learning needs at the right time.

Re-framing learning is like resuming a game from the stage the student is actually at, rather than the stage we imagine they should be at. It means understanding their starting point and creating the conditions for them to move forward, gaining confidence with each achievement.

The challenge is to make this kind of support possible in large classrooms where students come from a wide variety of backgrounds. Public schools welcome students with diverse backgrounds, whose experiences are marked by social, emotional, and family challenges.

This is precisely where the teacher’s role must be central. The teacher is the mediator of this experience. It is the teacher who transforms content into meaning, mistakes into opportunities, and difficulties into strategies for progress. No technology can replace this perspective. On the contrary: digital tools and artificial intelligence only make sense when they expand the teacher’s ability to assess, personalize instruction, and monitor each student’s progress.

When used properly, these tools enable individualized learning plans, help identify specific gaps, and offer pathways for students to move forward without failing being the automatic outcome.

When this student encounters teaching materials and practices designed for a different reality—often inspired by private-school models—he or she experiences yet another failure. The activity is beyond his or her current level, he or she cannot keep up, fails the course, and begins to believe that the problem lies with him or her.

Students need to be able to make mistakes just like they do in video games. They need to test things out, experiment, and try again without fear.

We also need to open the school’s walls to the real world. Today’s young people have their own languages, their own interests, and different ways of engaging with knowledge. They are extremely intelligent, connected, and socially sophisticated. The problem isn’t young people. The problem is when schools insist on models that have already proven ineffective.

Every student brings their own knowledge, experiences, and skills to the classroom. The school’s role is to build on that foundation to foster new learning and enable students to experience success. Because no one learns under pressure or out of obligation—they learn when it makes sense.

There is, however, one aspect we rarely discuss: many students go through their entire school career without understanding their own learning path.

We say they’re “behind,” but behind in relation to what? We rarely explain what paths they’re on, what they’ve already achieved, or what hurdles they still need to overcome. In video games, this logic is clear: each level presents defined challenges, visible goals, and a constant sense of progress. At school, however, this journey often remains vague.

Reframing learning involves, precisely, making the learning journey visible. When students understand their progress, recognize their achievements, and see meaning in what they are learning, they take ownership of the process. And it is the teacher who makes this possible by guiding this journey, helping students understand where they are, where they can go, and what steps they need to take to move forward.

Putting the student at the center of the educational experience means listening to them, trusting them, and allowing them to feel a sense of ownership of the school. I have visited schools where students managed social media, created content, and presented projects independently and with pride. There, learning took place because there was a sense of belonging and teachers who knew how to make room for it.

The process of rebuilding learning, therefore, cannot be achieved through one-off measures alone. It requires a more profound change: redesigning the school so that the act of learning makes sense again, with the teacher at the center as a facilitator of learning and the student as the protagonist.

Rebuilding learning is, above all, about rebuilding the bond between the student, the teacher, and the school. And that begins when we understand something simple: education only works when the student wants to play this game and believes they can win each level.

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