Credibility: Part 2 - The Power of Not Knowing

Two weeks ago, I wrote about establishing credibility.  I opened with a story about a kid who declared, "She knows everything."  I know a lot of things, but I definitely do not know everything.  I have a job that presents me with daily opportunities to model the power of not knowing, admitting that I don't know, and learning (or very rarely, deciding not to learn) many things.

This week presented an opportunity.  Two students were working on a project and needed to interview someone about the war in Ukraine.  Well-known Ukraine expert that I am, they decided to interview me (Please note the enormous sarcasm in that sentence. They chose me because I was the first person they found who didn't have a class during that period.)  Some of the questions were about my opinion and were simple to answer.  Some required a great deal of speculation.  But there was one I couldn't answer at all.  They asked if I thought the terrain of Ukraine was helpful or harmful to their effort to defend themselves. I don't know where these 8th-grade students found this question, but I definitely wasn't expecting it.  My answer to them was that I don't know enough about geography to give an answer.  Wanting quotes for their project, they attempted to press me for a specific answer.  I said, "No, the answer I gave you was valid. I just don't have enough knowledge to give you an informed opinion."  They decided they were happy enough with my other answers to call it a day, but I don't know if they realized that it is important not just to guess at an answer like that, that is okay to say, "I don't have an opinion on that because I don't know enough."

During the summer, President Biden announced the forgiving of up to ten thousand dollars of federal student loan debt.  Within seconds, people flooded social media with either criticism or praise.  Everyone, it seemed, was an expert on the economic impact of such a move or the theological implications of agreeing with or disagreeing with it.  People's opinions were as strong as they were instantaneous, and I wondered how informed they could possibly be.  I'm certainly not informed enough to have a strong opinion on it, at least not yet.  The one reaction I'm sure is not okay is, "It's not fair. I had to pay mine, so they should have to pay theirs." That's a middle school level understanding of fairness and justice, so I pretty quickly dismissed the thoughts coming from those people.  I don't know if this will increase or decrease inflation, and neither do most of the people spouting about it online.  My natural inclination is to say that if you signed a contract, you knew what you were getting yourself into and should be required to fulfill it, but I also don't know if the interest rates are at usurious levels or how hard to interpret the contract was to the average college freshman.  I just don't know enough to have a strong opinion.

Teachers, we are in the profession of modeling, among other things, appropriate adult behavior.  Admitting we don't know things or don't have enough information to have an opinion on some things is an important thing to model.  It is counter-cultural in the best possible way because it models humility and openness and shows them that education is an ongoing process.  

Bonus: It gives us more credibility when we do actually know something because we haven't bluffed our way through other things.      

Knowing the Name of Something

"Knowing the name of something doesn't mean you understand it." - Richard Feynman

My blog is usually for any teacher, but this one has a much more science teacher focus.  You might still get something out it if you don't teach science, but expect it to be more about teaching science.

This week, I taught Archimedes' Principle, which explains why some things float and others sink.  It's one of my favorite things to teach because of the conversation I get to have with each of my 8th-grade classes.  Here's how it goes.

• I hold up a golf ball and ask if it will float or sink when I put it in water.  Those who have apparently never golfed think it will float.  I drop it in the water, and it sinks.
• I hope up a practice ball that is the same size, but the interior is foam (I've never figured out why they exist as practicing with them would not be the same, but I digress).  They're on to me, so they know that one will float.
• I ask why.  First I get the cheap answers, like "because they are made of different materials" and "because one has more air in it."  I say, "Well, sure, but the question I'm asking is why does that matter?"  
• At some point, a kid who has listened in elementary school says either the word "density" or "buoyancy."  Now, we're cooking.  I respond with, "You say density like you know what it means.  Do you."  Chagrinned expressions abound when they say, "Well, actually, no."
• I tell them that I am going to explain the reason things float or sink without using the word density and that I will then bring it around to density in the end because, while they are not wrong, I want them to understand what that means, not just know the right word.

While this is the most explicit example of this phenomenon of the year, it happens about three times a week in smaller ways.  Students have learned that if they say the word the teacher is looking for, they'll be told "good job" and moved away from.  They know the standard textbook definitions of matter ("anything that takes up space and mass") and energy ("the ability to do work"), which are stupid definitions.  Those definitions aren't wrong, but they certainly aren't helpful.  

Science teachers, we have to slow down and take the time to ask students to elaborate.  When they give the right word, it does not always mean they know what they are talking about.  We have to find out which it is.  If I did not engage in this Archimedes' Principle conversation, students would go on throughout their whole lives knowing the right word to say without understanding the role density plays in floating.  While you might not think that matters, I'm not teaching science if I am only teaching words and not complete ideas.  

This is where it helps to have students understand that you are the expert in the room.  I know the recent "guide on the side rather than sage on the stage" movement has taught you that kids can discover everything they need to know, but they can't.  They can float things and sink them all they want and come to very wrong conclusions, just as people did for thousands of years before Archimedes.  They can go on thinking heavy things fall faster than light ones just as people did for thousands of years before Galileo.  They need you to explicitly tell them things, even if you decide they should experience it afterward.  I have students build aluminum foil boats to apply Archimedes' Principle, but I would never dream of having them do that without the direct instruction first and follow-up reflection on which boats held the most weight after.  

Richard Feynman was one of the great physics teachers of the twentieth century.  His quote above was his philosophy of education.  At one point, he went as far as to say it didn't matter at all whether students knew the name of something; they only needed to understand it, but he ended up reversing that decision because he said people would ask him about something by naming it, and when he told them he didn't know about it they would be shocked and start explaining it, only for him to realize he did know about it but hadn't recognized his name.  In his book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, he talks a lot about his father and the ways in which he taught young Richard to view the world.  His father was the one who told him how knowing the name of something wasn't the same as knowing about the thing.  That set him on the path to becoming the physicist and professor he eventually became.  Had it not been for his very-much-non-scientist dad, Richard Feynman might not have been the amazing scientist that he was.  

In your classroom, they are students, and you are the teacher.  Be the teacher.  That means that you decide what they are capable of learning from internet research and observation and what you need to explicitly tell them.  It means that when you have them do internet research and hands-on experiences, you have to follow up with formative assessment questions to find out if they learned what you wanted them to learn.  It means you decide what level of mastery they should have to achieve before you move on.  It means you find out whether they know the name of something or whether they actually understand it.

Credibility First

One of my favorite moments of each year happened this week.  A student asked a question, and, as I began to answer it, another student said, "How does she know all of this?"  Other students remind him that I am a teacher, to which he replies, "But she knows everything."  

Let me be clear.  I know a lot of things, but I do not know everything.  I make no attempt to convince students that I know everything.  In fact, I probably say, "I don't know" at least once a class period every day.  They tend to forget that, in part, because I often follow it up with, "but my best guess would be . . ." Rather than recognize that as educated speculation, they forget that I opened with the admission that I didn't actually know.  The reason it is one of my favorite moments isn't that it is good for my ego; it is because I know at that moment that I have established credibility with my class.

There are teachers everywhere who use the phrase "relationships are everything" on their social media and in their conversations and wax eloquent about how they spend the first two weeks just building relationships with their new students.  While I appreciate their intention, I always think about how creeped out I would have felt as a student if any of my teachers had spent the first two weeks trying to bond with me.  We don't expect that from other relationships or professions (with the possible exception of ministers).  When I go to a new doctor,  I first want him to have a medical degree from a good university.  While I want him to be professionally warm and have a good bedside manner, I don't want him to try to make friends with me.  If I needed a lawyer, I might appreciate a personable approach, but before that, I would want to know how many cases he has successfully tried and what kind of law he studied in school.  Relationships would not be "everything" to me; credibility would be.

Please understand that I am not saying the opposite is true.  I'm not saying that relationships are nothing.  I am simply saying that credibility comes first.  Only then do students have any reason to want a relationship with me.  Relationships follow credibility, so let's talk about how to build credibility.

1. Convey your credentials - In the same way, I would want to see a diploma on my doctor's or lawyer's office wall, I do the same thing in my classroom. My college diploma and my teaching certificate are both framed and hanging behind my desk.  I tell my students how many years I have taught the subject I am teaching them.  It may seem like you are bragging on yourself, but what you are really doing is making students comfortable that they are in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing.
2. Keep your word - You tell students a lot of things in the first few days of school.  It may be about rules or procedures or what you are going to put on their first test.  It is always important to keep your word, but it is especially vital during those first couple of weeks.  If you tell them a question is going to be on a quiz, make sure you put that question on that quiz.  If you tell them that something will happen if they don't follow a certain procedure, you have to follow through on that the first time it happens.  (That means you don't make empty threats or promises, so don't say things just to be dramatic.) If you introduce yourself to your students as a person whose word cannot be trusted, you will never get to the point of developing relationships.
3. Take your job seriously - Students can tell the difference between teachers who plan lessons intentionally and those who wing it every day.  They can tell the difference between teachers who grade with care and feedback and those who just give everyone an A (They may say they like the latter, but I've heard them talk about them behind their back. They don't respect them, and they certainly don't do any valuable work for them.) Students can tell the difference between a teacher who manages their classroom to ensure everyone can learn and those who let the class run wild (or conversely are on a power trip).  If you take your job seriously, students see that and respond to it. 
4. Show your enthusiasm - You chose teaching for a reason. It may have been purely that you loved kids or it may have been a love of learning or an excitement for your subject.  Show that to your students.  History was not naturally my favorite subject, but when I had a teacher who truly loved it, he inspired me to read books about Russian Czars (in 7th grade, no less).  And if you want to build relationships, showing enthusiasm is one of the best ways to do that.  People are drawn to those who enjoy things. I get emails from students during breaks, in which they share something they saw out in the wild that reminded them of something I taught them.  They only do that because they know I will be excited about it.

After you have earned credibility with your students, then they will be more naturally inclined to want a relationship with you.  It won't be creepy that you are asking them questions about their lives if they trust you as their teacher. 

Cost Benefit Analysis - Teaching Techniques

If you are a teacher, there is a ton of advice out there about how to do your job better.  While that is a good thing, it is also a daunting thing.  Most of the advice is contradictory because many people write books out of their own philosophy, not out of the results of research.  Some of them try to make you feel guilty for having a different philosophy than that of the author.  Just put those books down.  There is no technique good enough to put yourself through a guilt-inducing book from an arrogant author.  

Even if we filter out all of that and focus only on the good books by authors who care about research, there is still an overwhelming amount of information and advice.  You can't go into your classroom on Tuesday and completely turn your practice upside down to match the book you just read.  Change has to be incremental to be sustainable or even possible.  So, this is a little meta, but I'm going to give you advice about advice to help you sort through all of the advice.

1. Let me shamelessly rip off two quotes from friends of mine.  Andrew Watson opens every session with "Don't do this thing.  Think this way."  He will tell you that knowledge of working memory or growth mindset or any other piece of research will look different in your classroom than it does in the classroom next door.  The researcher had a very specific methodology that you may or may not be able to do, so allow the knowledge to guide your thinking rather than dictate your actions.  Similarly, John Almarode ends his presentations with, "Don't adopt.  Adapt to your context."  In the same way as Andrew, he is telling his audience that they can't just drop a technique and hope for the best.  The way you implement a new technique will be different if you are a high school science teacher than if you were a 3rd-grade Spanish teacher.  So when you read a book, an article, or a blog post, figure out the deeper meaning behind the technique and use your professional judgment to choose the implementation of the idea.
2. Only fix what is broken.  It can be so easy to sit in a professional development session and feel bad about yourself.  If you don't do the thing that is being presented, you may feel like a bad teacher.  Yet, you know that a lot of what you do works.  You have students who learn concepts, develop skills, pass your tests, perform well on AP tests, and succeed in college; so lighten up on yourself.  You also know you have room for growth because everyone does (and you are part of everyone).  Look at your yearly map.  What is the one concept you have trouble explaining clearly or that your kids struggle with most?  Is there a way to approach that differently?  Then, address that one thing this year.  You don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater just because you attended a conference.
3. Some techniques are complex, and they don't work if you don't implement them fully.  It's okay to choose not to use those, but if you only implement the easy parts, don't then blame the technique if it doesn't produce results.  You may have seen recently, for example, some negative feedback about growth-mindset in online conversations.  Schools who were attempting to implement it were not finding the results they felt Carol Dweck had promised.  When looking deeper, however, what happened was that some teachers were introducing it on the first day of school and then never doing any of it again or hanging posters about learning from mistakes but then speaking as people with fixed mindsets.  After a 20 minute seminar, they took away, "Sure, I can tell kids they aren't good at math YET" but didn't take the time to recognize that there is more to it than that.  It's not the fault of the researcher that we apply only a tiny part of a complex practice.  When choosing a technique, take the time to find out if it is okay to pick and choose parts or not.
4. Now, you are ready to choose a technique, guided by the input you just received from a speaker, a book, or a podcast.  How do you choose?  I'm going to suggest that you do a little cost/benefit analysis.  Some techniques are difficult or time intensive to implement.  Not everything that takes a long time to develop or implement is worth the time you put into it, but some things are.  Look at the breadth and depth of the outcome.  If the technique can be used for multiple chapters with the results you want, then it might be worth investing the time it takes to do it.  If there is a technique that takes very little time to implement, try it because any benefit you get out of it will be a good return on that small amount of time.  For example, I recently read a blog post about framing your objectives as questions instead of statements (I would cite this, but I read so many things that I have forgotten the source - like the Learning and the Brain website).  According to the post, evidence shows that students have more sustained attention and slightly better test scores when the objective is presented as something to explore.  This takes me ZERO time to implement because I was already writing the objective on the board, so now I write it as a question rather than a statement.  If there is any result at all, I am looking at an infinite benefit-to-cost ratio.  

Don't be afraid to tweak or drop something that isn't working.  Not all techniques are for everyone.  Even the best technique is not the best match for every class.  Teachers are humans and are able to do some things better than others.  Choose those that will work for your class, with your philosophy, based on your goals.  The science of learning is not meant to prescribe what every teacher must do.  It is meant to give you knowledge of the impact of a variety of strategies so that you can choose what matches you and your classroom goals.  Some may work exactly the way they did in the experiment; some may need a little adjustment to adapt it to your environment.  Some may just not be a good fit for you, and that is okay.