Chapter 23:
One of the clearest lessons I have learned as a teacher is to anticipate inspiration. I am not talking about any inspiration that could come from me. The students are the ones who inspire. They are creative, stunning, and full of surprises! Working with students is an enormous privilege.
“I want to say something that is very important for you to hear. Thank you! Thank you for the privilege of coming to school every day and learning with you and learning from you. You put me in awe. I am very, very fortunate to learn with you. My job is called teacher, but I think it should be called Fortunate Learner.
“As you travel through your learning journey, I want you to look for moments of learning that come from other people. Sometimes you’ll experience those moments at school, but much of the time it happens outside of school. You may hear ideas or see examples in other people that contribute to your lives.
“I plan to contribute to your lives each and every day. That is part of my job. But I want you to look beyond what I share with you. I want you to anticipate — or expect ahead of time — moments that will surprise you. Doesn’t it sound funny to expect surprises? But that is exactly what I want you to do. I want you to be prepared to detect powerful learning moments that might have otherwise passed you by.
“Let me give you an example. The example is you. Your thinking is so powerful, so amazing, and so striking that I learn from you every single day. Yet, I could somehow overlook it if I wasn’t paying attention. So I am determined to pay attention. I am determined to anticipate. I am determined to recognize — the best I can — that you inspire me every single day.
“Thank you!
“I know that I am very, very fortunate to learn from you. But in order to do that, I have to make a choice to pay attention to what you have to teach me. That’s why I choose to anticipate. I choose to anticipate inspiration.”
This Big Idea has very little do with the way teachers inspire their students.
This Big Idea is about how inspiring the students can be to their teachers and to one another.
When I walk into a classroom anticipating inspiration, I am not expecting to be the one to inspire the students. Rather, I am fully expecting to be inspired by the students. I also fully understand that one of the deepest sources of inspiration for each of the students may not be me. Instead, the students may best be inspired by one another.
When I entered the teaching profession, the concept of seeking to be inspired by the students did not occur to me. I was focused on teaching the students — focused on teaching content to the students.
As the years progressed, I learned to give the students more and more space in the learning process. I learned to move away from what was quantifiable, and to step into some riskier territory. Prior to this learning, I understood how to correct a page of twenty questions, write a percentage correct on the top of the page, and to partially gauge the success of the lesson for each student based on that score. However, those questions usually had answers that could be scored, that could be graded, and that could be referenced to an answer key.
While there is a very important place for efficiency, and more importantly, for a way to gauge each student’s level of understanding with important foundational skills, it is imperative to understand that, if it is carried too far, that place can be very limiting to both students and teachers.
If the greatest latitude I give to students is to be able to produce answers that have already been discovered by someone else and have already been printed in an answer key, how much am I really allowing them to grow? In such a case, students may become successful on objective after objective after objective and still gain very little ground as learners.
It is difficult to be inspired as a teacher if the goal, day after day, is merely for students to produce work that matches an existing answer key.
When this realization occurred to me, I began adapting my lessons so that they provided much more space for students to think. And within that thinking space, the students amazed me. They inspired me.
Now I anticipate inspiration.
I give the students space to stun me.
Let me tell you that this process was not easy. It was not painless, and it was not fast. Sometimes we struggled, wrestled, ran into very difficult obstacles and had no idea how to go forward. That does not sound very inviting does it?
But listen to that sentence again in the context of providing a powerful learning experience for students: “Sometimes we struggled, wrestled, ran into very difficult obstacles and had no idea how to go forward.” That is precisely the place where learning becomes powerful. That is the risk that I want to take, and it is the place where I want my students to return day after day. It is also precisely the point from which students inspire me as they rise above worthwhile challenges.
Not only do I need to anticipate inspiration, I need to give the students opportunities to rise above profound challenges. Yes, those challenges can frighten me. What happens if they do not rise above them? What if they fail? What if I fail?
The truth is that those struggles are okay. It is important to face profound challenges that we do not yet know how to conquer. Being willing to face deep challenges, rather than avoiding them, is a critical part of our journey.
I am looking for inspiration. I am anticipating inspiration, and I fully recognize that it may not come from me at all. The students are amazing, and I stand in awe. I also stand in anticipation of inspiration.