I have worked in education for 6 years. One of my primary goals during that time in working with students and teachers was to shift the mindset of what real learning is. In the age of “high stakes testing”, teachers are taking more and more responsibility for children’s learning. This may sound like a good thing but, in fact, it’s a very dangerous cycle.
If the teacher believes he or she must control the learning, they get swept into a cycle of control. They ask questions for which there is only one right answer. In some cases, this is necessary, for example when memorizing facts. However, we’ve started taking it too far, trying to sculpt ever answer that comes out of a child’s mouth to match exactly what the teacher deems “right”. Some of the most painful moments I’ve witnessed in education are when a teacher stands in front of a group of students, hinting and prodding them to parrot exactly what her or she considers to be the “correct” answer, dismissing the creative variety of answers from the students as “wrong”.
It was this cycle of control that I wanted to break using the idea of open-ended questions as a foundational tool. In an age where a student’s cell phone knows more than the teacher ever will, the playing field evens out. It’s no longer about how much information you can “contain”, it’s about how much information you can access. So as the circumstances shift, so does the process. I challenged teachers on a daily basis to ask questions that even they didn’t know the answer to and see what would come up. The goal was to let them get comfortable with not controlling the answer.
Because truth is, we can’t control what students learn. We can encourage, present, empower, and offer. But if they don’t want to learn, they won’t. We can only control ourselves and what we bring. To focus on controlling what we get sends us into an exhausting cycle of drama.
The good news? How you ask the question determines the answer you get. Even if we can’t (and don’t need to) control what we get back, we can still control what we bring to it. And what we bring will change what we get.
How would your teaching or parenting change if you focused on what you bring to it rather than what you get from it?