Education Matters Group – Tip of The Week 2020/21 -Okay with the Unknown Matters!

 Successful teachers are okay with the unknown. It’s difficult to teach in an environment where you don’t know the future of your classroom budget, the involvement of your student’s parents, or the outcome of all your hard work.

On a more philosophical level, educators who teach the higher grades are tasked with teaching students principles that have a lot of unknowns (i.e. physics). How comfortable are you with not having all the answers?

Good teachers are able to function without everything tied up neatly in a bow. So what tips can we have with being okay with the unknown? Here is some top tips for you and for students:

1. Be prepared to laugh at yourself – doing this will show you are human and will relate well with students.
2. Expect to not know everything – the level of information is greatly increasing. The level of knowledge of a teacher will be limited to some capacity. What may not be limited though is their ability to investigate and model that investigation of facts.
3. Get students involved to help solve problems – what you will do here is value their input and give them some responsibility. Humble yourself in some ways and value your students as well – they will have some knowledge that you don’t have.
4. Rather than looking at what you don’t know, model the questions you want to find out and how you will find them out. Get students involved in this process as well.
5. Model a lifelong learner – show students you are constantly learning new interesting skills. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes with this as well as this can simply show your students that you are willing to discover new areas of learning for yourself. Errors are just opportunities to learn something new.