One of my favorite shows is Ted Lasso. In one of the most famous scenes, Ted and Rebecca are in the local pub, where they encounter her ex-husband, Rupert, a notorious bully and the show’s villain. Rupert believes he has the upper hand over Rebecca and the seemingly incompetent American soccer coach she has hired, and he challenges Ted to a game of darts. Ted’s commentary on the dart game has stayed with me. In it, he outlines a simple theme for his life: “Be curious, not judgmental.”
The show and the quotation have stayed with me, influencing many of my interactions, maybe especially in my work in the classroom. Nowhere is it more important to keep adapting and changing, to stay curious, than in the classroom, where we watch students grow and develop over the course of a year and then get a new group every fall. With so much change inherent in the job, it is always easier to cling to the familiar and keep doing what “works.” But to keep growing as an educator and to keep giving my best to the students I see every day, it is essential to stay curious. Here are three questions to ask myself and students in my school to help me stay curious and remain innovative.
What are you learning?
One day as my students were leaving class, my principal stopped a young man just outside the door. “What did you learn today?” he asked.
“Um, not much,” the student said.
My jaw dropped. I had meticulously planned that class, and students had been involved in a variety of engaging activities. I had standards posted, and thought I had done everything right. The student in question was thoughtful and kind, and had worked hard and participated well. I was completely bewildered about why he would answer this way.
When I asked him about it the next day, he was confused about why I had even remembered the conversation. “I wasn’t saying anything bad about you,” he said. “We had a fun class yesterday. I just already knew how to do it all.”
The moment sticks in my mind as a turning point for the way I thought about my standards and how I expressed the learning students should do in my class. If he had been asked, “What did you do in class today?,” he could have rattled off a list of tasks: collaborate with others, find a main idea, and so on. The disparity was that he saw what we did in class as only a list of tasks, whereas I saw it as a process of growth, a series of building blocks stacking and fitting together.
Realizing the mindset my students brought to class required me to change how I talked to them about the class and how I set up the activities, opening them to my thought process and demonstrating how what we did built on previous learning and helped them grow. Considering his answer also reminded me that each student is individual and needs to be guided toward individual growth, whatever that looks like for each student. I hope I would have come to these changes in time, but the process was set in motion by asking a student what he meant and listening to his answer without judgment.
How do you know you’re learning?
As a teacher, I prepared endless rubrics and checklists and lists of instructions so students could understand whether they were learning. While these were useful in some ways, what they ultimately accomplished was making my students dependent on teacher-made lists. Discussing what we hoped to learn in a unit and listening to what students said about their own measurements of success was informative, because students almost always said that they knew they had learned when they passed the test.
Asking questions enabled me to decrease the importance I had placed on tests, and increase the focus on meaningful formative assessments, which allows students to track their own growth over the course of a unit. Asking this question led me to help students view learning based on growth in many different measures instead of mastery of district-required multiple-choice questions.
How can you best show learning?
Most of the time in my class, I decided how students would show their learning. I spent a lot of time and energy developing creative options for writing and reading, most of which were met with lukewarm enthusiasm. It was sometimes hard for them to get excited when the final outcome was out of their control, and often, no matter how fun the activity was, they didn’t want to do it.
When students have a clearer approach to the standards, it may be time to let them help develop their own assessments. If they understand what they are learning and how they will know if they have achieved it, they can also be trusted with deciding how to demonstrate their learning.
This process takes guidance to help students decide if their projects are too big to accomplish in the time frame or if they need further development, and it may take suggestions or examples to get them started. Students who are accustomed to following teacher-led projects may be resistant, and may prefer taking the easier way of just doing whatever we say. But when they get going, the investment they have in those projects makes it worth the time and energy we spend, and makes the time and energy spent more productive for everyone.
Sometimes it is difficult for me to stay curious, because I tend to think I should already know everything. It’s hard for me to listen to what my students say when I’m judging myself and what I must have missed. Ted Lasso’s comment stays with me because it reminds me of the need to both continue to ask questions and let go of what I assumed the answers should be. When we stop fearing what the answers to our questions may be, our classroom lives are exciting and fresh every day, because every day leads us to new discoveries.
