from Terry Hayek
My biggest takeaway from college was learning what I didn’t know.
So many passionate, crazy-smart people—teachers and students—who modeled learning and curiosity like I hadn’t seen before. Whole courses on individual ideas, I wouldn’t think of it without someone pointing it out to me. It was mind-blowing.
In high school, my academic interactions were based almost entirely on trying to figure out what the teacher wanted and then doing my best to deliver it. There was creativity, curiosity and demandingness, but it was almost always overshadowed by my desire to “do well in school” and the teachers want to “achieve results”.
As teachers, we implore students to forget what we want and focus instead on following their curiosity, showing their creativity, and reaching deep understanding, and then we throw them into a well-orchestrated game of grades, GPAs, test scores, reading levels, and a dizzying array of metrics that often contradicts everything we’ve asked of them.
The value of what students don’t know
Understanding is a process that begins first with awareness—not a goal, standard, or learning outcome. These are all pieces of the puzzle that is instructional design, but understanding is different – something that moves by itself – evasive – between observation and wisdom.
Awareness comes from careful observation of yourself, your own thought patterns, and the bits and pieces of the world around you.
Take an academic idea—the writing process, for example. Understanding the writing process is as much a concept as it is a skill. Part of the skill comes from knowing its parts and using them over time, but understanding is also a matter of context and place.
What is the writing process like?
How can one use it well and how badly?
What other processes exist in the world that can help me understand the writing process?
What is the most appropriate step in the process for me as a writer?
What tools and strategies do I know that I can use to support me at each stage? Do good writers go back and forth through each stage?
Is this process a school thing or real? How do the technologies I use to communicate affect my need to write effectively? How can I tell if I’m “doing it right”? Is the writing process as it is now relevant in 2018?
“Ignorance” as context
All these questions hint at the complexity of everything, no matter how we, as teachers, hope to analyze and compartmentalize. Breaking these complexities into pieces may seem to serve assessment and daily lessons, and may even help students take things one bite at a time, but ultimately things need to be seen and used in a context that is natural and meaningful to learners.
Which brings us to the idea of starting the learning process with what we don’t do. The idea here is for learners to encounter both the thing and its context.
The process of writing and the irony of structuring creativity through that process.
The steps of the scientific process and their elegance.
The branches of government and the need to govern them.
So, macro and micro, but also known and unknown. You can’t understand something unless you have some idea of what you don’t know. Activating prior knowledge is great, but what about current ignorance? Otherwise, you have no sense of scale or immediacy.
Teaching is a thoughtful design of interactions
It’s not a matter of overwhelming students with some huge pile of bullet points or a concept map of everything they don’t know. Learning can’t be a to-do list or all you’ll ever “do” is the list. Teaching is therefore as much a matter of designing how students encounter and play with ideas as it is of delivering content.
Helping them see what they are learning in the ecology of what they are doing and don’t know—using what they don’t know as an ever-present bridge to everything else.
As students “play” with these ideas, they naturally encounter their own shortcomings and misunderstandings. They are hitting their own soft ceilings of knowledge and are all the more acutely aware because they have hit it themselves and not been relentlessly pushed into it by “instruction”.
So play and self-direction are strategies that can help learners confront what they do and don’t know, but it’s a broader problem with the model of learning that depends on the underlying patterns between teacher, student, content, and networks.
But see if there is room for it in your classroom. Instead of a simple KWL chart or pretest, ask them to discuss, narrate, write about, concept map, or otherwise communicate what they do and don’t know.
Then help them stick to it; help them further explore what they don’t know.
Try this instead
Instead of celebrating their ability to answer questions, help them see not knowing as a wonderful kind of beginning. Ask them plainly, “What don’t you know?” then smile.
Then press it some more.
Use what they know to carve out a kind of organic boundary that can shrink or grow outward as they encounter new ideas, explore misconceptions, and combine multiple sources of information to create new perspectives that they can use to grow even more.
Ask, “What are the limits of what you know?”
Poetry, for example. What is the difference between verse and stanza? Which definition—verse or stanza—do you feel more confident about? Which can you explain in more detail with more convincing examples? Fantastic, now what about the other one – the one you don’t know as well – what about him?
I mean, what really is the thing and what isn’t the thing? What is its essence? You don’t know, do you? This is fantastic. Let’s think together and find new things that we don’t know, you and me.
And then use this model yourself. Bounce back and forth between the known and the unknown with enthusiasm and purpose, letting students know that it is these kinds of interactions that lead to the kind of understanding that changes lives.
Because without that kind of self-direction, students will always follow the steps, not the possibilities.
