go through Terry Heck
My biggest takeaway from college was learning what I didn’t know.
So many passionate, crazy smart people – teachers and students – who shape learning and curiosity like I’ve never seen before. The entire course was about a single idea that I wouldn’t have given a second thought to if someone hadn’t pointed it out to me. It’s really unbelievable.
In high school, my academic interactions were almost entirely based on trying to figure out what the teacher wanted and then doing my best to achieve it. I have creativity, curiosity, and rigor, but it’s almost always overshadowed by my desire to “do well in school” and my teachers’ desire to “get results.”
As teachers, we ask our students to forget about what we want and instead focus on following their curiosity, demonstrating their creativity, and developing deep understanding, and then we plunge them into an orchestrated game of grades, GPAs, test scores, reading levels, and dizzying metrics that often run counter to what we want from them.
What students don’t know about the value of things
Understanding something does not start with goals, standards or learning outcomes. These are all pieces of the instructional design puzzle, but understanding is different—it moves on its own between observation and wisdom.
Awareness comes from careful observation of yourself, your thought patterns, and the world around you.
Take the academic thought-writing process as an example. Understanding the writing process is both a concept and a skill. Skill partly comes from understanding its parts and using them over time, but understanding also depends on context and location.
What was the writing process like?
How can we use it well or poorly?
Are there other processes that can help me understand the writing process?
As a writer, what are the most relevant steps in this process for me?
What tools and strategies do I know that can support me at every stage? Do good writers move back and forth between each stage?
Is this process a school thing or a real thing? How do the technologies I use to communicate affect my need to write effectively? How do I know if I’m “doing it right”? Will the current writing process still be relevant in 2026?
“Ignorance” as background
These questions hint at the complexity of it all, no matter how we as teachers wish to parse it all. Breaking these complexities into pieces might seem like it could serve assessments and daily lessons, or even help students learn one small piece at a time, but ultimately, things need to be viewed and used in contexts that are native and meaningful to the learner.
This gave us the idea of starting the learning process with something we don’t know. The idea here is to have learners encounter things and their context simultaneously.
The writing process, and the irony of building creativity through that process.
The steps of the scientific process and its elegance.
Government departments and governance needs.
Therefore, there is macro and micro, as well as known and unknown. You can’t understand something unless you know something about something you don’t know. Activating prior knowledge is great, but what about current ignorance? Otherwise, you have no sense of scale or immediacy.
Teaching is thoughtfully designed to be interactive
It’s not about overwhelming students with a bunch of bullet points or a concept map that includes stuff they don’t know. Studying cannot be a to-do list, or a list of all you have to do. Teaching, then, is a matter of designing how students come into contact with and use ideas.
Help them understand what they are learning in the ecology of what they are doing and Not knowing – using what they don’t know as an ever-present bridge to everything else.
As students “play” with these ideas, they naturally encounter their own shortcomings and misunderstandings. They hit their cognitive soft ceiling and are more acutely aware of it because they hit it themselves, rather than being inexorably pushed into it by “instructions.”
So games and self-instruction are strategies that can help learners encounter what they know and don’t know, but it’s a matter of a broader learning model that depends on the underlying patterns between teachers, students, content, and networks.
But see if you have the space in your classroom. Rather than using simple KWL diagrams or pretests, have them discuss, narrate, write concept maps, or otherwise communicate what they know and don’t know.
And then help them stick with it; help them further explore what they don’t know.
try this
Instead of celebrating their ability to answer questions, help them understand have no idea As a great start. Ask them frankly: “What don’t you know?”
Then push it further.
Use what they know to create a boundary that can shrink or expand outward when they encounter new ideas, examine misconceptions, and reconcile what they know with what they don’t know to create new perspectives that they can use to grow further.
Ask: “What are the limitations of what you know?”
Take poetry for example. What is the difference between verse and stanza? Which definition (verse or stanza) are you more confident in? What can you explain in more detail with more convincing examples? Great, now what about the other one – the one you don’t recognize either – how about it?
I mean, what is a real thing and what is not a thing? What is its essence? You don’t know, do you? marvelous. You and me, let’s create meaning together and discover new things we didn’t know we had.
Then use this pattern yourself. Jumping back and forth between the known and the unknown with passion and purpose lets students know that it is these interactions that lead to life-changing understanding.
Because without this self-direction, students will always be following footsteps instead of possibilities.
