I have a confession to make.

I say “I don’t know” to my students an alarming number of times for someone whose job title contains the word teacher.

“Mrs. Sopko, how are we supposed to…?”

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“Should we use cardboard for this?”

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“How long should this be?”

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“Is this going to work?”

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“Is this right?”

I definitely don’t know.

What do you think?

At this point, I’m fairly certain some of my students suspect I have no idea what’s happening in my own classroom.

They’re not entirely wrong.

Sometimes I genuinely don’t know.

And those might be my favorite moments.

“What will happen if we try this?”

“I have absolutely no idea. Let’s find out.”

Those are the moments when I get to pull up my own chair and join the conversation.

But most of the time when I say, “I don’t know. What do you think?” I actually do have an answer.

I probably know what I would do.

But that’s exactly the problem.

If I tell them what I would do, there’s a pretty good chance that’s what they’ll do too.

And now we’ve lost the opportunity to find out what they would have done.

Teachers are incredibly efficient answer-giving machines.

A child asks a question.

We answer it.

Problem solved.

Except sometimes I wonder if we’ve solved the wrong problem.

The student’s problem was not knowing.

But not knowing is precisely where thinking begins.

I see this most often when students are working on something open-ended.

“How big should I make it?”

“What should I use?”

“How many do I need?”

“Where should this go?”

“Is this what you want?”

That last one is the question I will almost never answer.

Especially with gifted students.

Many of them have become exceptionally good at figuring out what adults want. They know how to follow directions. They know how to meet the rubric. They know how to produce something polished, correct, and impressive.

Then I give them a task with a fuzzy part.

There isn’t one right process/material/answer.

The directions don’t explain precisely what the finished product should look like.

And suddenly…

“BUT WHAT DO YOU WANT?”

I don’t know.

What do you want?

That discomfort is intentional.

Not because I enjoy watching children squirm.

Okay, maybe just a tiny bit.

But mostly because somewhere along the way, they have to learn to trust their own judgment.

I tell them this all the time:

“I’m not always going to be here to help you make this decision.”

There won’t always be a Mrs. Sopko standing nearby to tell them whether the cardboard is the right material.

At some point, they’re going to have to look at the problem, consider what they know, make a decision, and live with what happens next.

And if it doesn’t work?

Wonderful.

Now we have something to think about.

This is one of the reasons I deliberately leave fuzzy spaces in the projects and challenges I design.

The ambiguity creates room.

Room to make decisions.

Room to take risks.

Room to discover that your first idea wasn’t your best idea.

Room to realize that someone else’s solution looks nothing like yours.

Room to change your mind.

And, eventually, room to trust yourself.

We talk a lot in education about student agency.

We want students to take ownership of their learning.

We want independent thinkers.

We want creative problem solvers.

And then we make approximately 4,000 tiny decisions for them every day.

Use this.

Put it here.

Make three.

Do it this way.

Start here.

Stop there.

Make it look like this.

And then, after making nearly every meaningful decision for them, we smile and announce:

“Be creative!”

I’m not sure that’s how creativity works.

And I’m pretty sure that’s not agency.

Agency isn’t something we suddenly hand children when they’re old enough.

Agency is built through hundreds of small opportunities to decide.

Which strategy should I try?

Who should I ask?

Do I understand this?

Is there another way?

What material makes sense?

What happens if I change this?

Is this idea worth pursuing?

Am I satisfied with what I’ve created?

Those decisions matter.

And every time I answer one that a student was capable of wrestling with, I wonder if I’ve accidentally taken away a tiny opportunity for them to practice making one.

That doesn’t mean I don’t teach.

I do.

A lot.

I teach strategies. I teach scholarly habits. I teach students how to think about their own thinking. I teach design thinking. I model processes. I ask questions. I give feedback. I provide information they don’t have and help them build the knowledge they need.

The goal isn’t to withhold help.

It’s knowing the difference between an answer that supports thinking and one that replaces it.

Because sometimes the fastest way to stop thinking is to give someone the answer.

And I don’t want to steal thinking that belongs to the learner.

That’s especially true when we’re creating.

Meraki is the idea of putting something of yourself into what you create: your creativity, your thinking, your experiences, your heart.

But if I make all the decisions, how much of you can possibly be left in the work?

A student can follow every direction I give, meet every requirement, and produce something perfectly lovely…

that contains almost none of them.

That’s not what I want.

I want to see the idea I never would have thought of.

The strange solution.

The unexpected connection.

The moment a student looks at something they’ve created and knows, I did that.

And I’ve learned something after years of trying very hard not to answer questions.

Students regularly come up with ideas that are better than mine.

Much better.

Ideas I couldn’t have anticipated.

Solutions I wouldn’t have suggested.

Directions I didn’t know the project could take.

That can’t happen if I’ve already decided where we’re going.

Maybe that’s why I keep imagining that ancient classroom beneath the trees.

Not because there was a teacher sitting at the front with all the answers.

Because there were people gathered together, wondering, questioning, challenging ideas, and seeing where the thinking might lead.

Sometimes I know what I would do.

Sometimes I have a pretty good idea.

Sometimes I genuinely have no clue.

But when a student asks me a question they’re capable of wrestling with, my answer is often the same.

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

Because those seven words mean much more than they seem to.

They mean:

I trust you to have an idea.

I trust you to try.

I trust you to be wrong.

I trust you to change your mind.

I trust that your answer doesn’t have to look like mine.

And I trust that your idea might be better than mine.

Actually, I’m counting on it.

So maybe the next time a student asks a question you know you don’t need to answer, resist the urge to be the incredibly efficient answer-giving machine teacher are so good at being.

Try seven words instead.

I don’t know. What do you think?

Because now we know everything those seven words actually mean.

What thinking might happen if you didn’t answer the next question?