I Don't Know What I Don't Know

I read an article the other day about technology in education. It talked about providing opportunities for teachers to take calculated risks—to support trying new things in an environment that didn’t punish failure. There were several comments but this one stood out to me:

How can I try new things? I don’t know what I don’t know.

I don’t know what I don’t know.

That response bothers me because I’ve heard it so many times as a way to passively deny responsibility—ignorance justifying inaction—and it is frequently accompanied by a lack of desire to learn. This is especially evident when those same folks do not attend trainings that are outside normal work hours and refuse to read online directions or watch help videos on their own. “I don’t know what I don’t know” should have “and I don’t want to” appended to the end in those cases.

None of us know what we don’t know, but we do know how to ask questions. The problem can be knowing which questions to ask. Give a teacher an iPad and ask them what they want to do with it, they may respond with “I don’t know what the device can do,” or “I don’t know what apps are available.” In that scenario, we’re not asking them the right question, and it shows that neither are they. The focus needs to be on the task not the tool.

It’s amazing how hard that can be. Life is full of “task” questions that we seem to figure out, but when technology is added to the mix it’s like we forgot how the process works. If I wanted to learn how to take better portrait pictures, I would search for the task (taking portrait pictures) as opposed to the tool (which I may not know). Similarly, if I wanted to use an iPad to teach math, searching for “how do I use an iPad” might clue me in to a whiteboard app or Note’s drawing functionality, but I’d have much better results searching for “how do I use an iPad to teach math.”

I don’t know what I don’t know. None of us do. But I’m willing to learn.