I had a system.

A good system, actually.

My students were helping prepare supplies for one of our schoolwide STEM events. There were a lot of kits to assemble, a lot of materials to organize, and a lot of children who needed to somehow turn piles of supplies into neatly packed sets.

I’d done this before.

I knew exactly how to make it efficient.

So I gathered the students together and prepared to explain my carefully perfected process.

Except I never got the chance.

Before I could begin, one of my students jumped up and ran to the front of the room, almost knocking me over, and started explaining how she thought they should do it.

She assigned jobs.

She created a process.

She explained how materials should move from one person to the next.

And everyone got to work.

I stood there watching.

Well.

Apparently my services were no longer required.

Even worse?

Her system was better than mine.

They finished faster.

For a teacher who spends a great deal of time telling students, “I don’t know. What do you think?” this really shouldn’t have surprised me.

But it did.

I think there’s an interesting contradiction in teaching.

We want students to become independent thinkers.

We want them to have agency.

We teach them strategies. We teach them how to collaborate and communicate. We help them learn to solve problems, evaluate ideas, reflect on what works, and change course when it doesn’t.

And then, when a problem appears, we very helpfully step forward and tell them exactly what to do.

Sometimes we’re just too good at helping.

I certainly was that day.

I wasn’t about to give my students the answer to some complicated academic problem.

I was going to explain how to assemble STEM kits.

It seemed harmless.

Helpful, even.

And it would have been.

They would have followed my directions.

The kits would have been assembled.

The job would have gotten done.

And I never would have discovered that a child in the room had a better idea.

That moment changed the way I think about these kinds of tasks.

Now, when students need to prepare supplies, I don’t give them my system.

I give them the problem.

Here’s what needs to be done.

Here are the materials.

Here’s how many kits we need.

Go.

Sometimes we even turn it into a challenge and see which class can develop a system that gets the job done most efficiently.

I could probably save them some time by telling them exactly what worked last year.

But saving time isn’t always the same thing as creating learning.

There’s something much more important happening while they’re figuring it out.

Someone has to notice what needs to happen first.

Someone has to propose an idea.

Someone else has to improve it.

They have to organize themselves, communicate, adjust, and occasionally realize that the brilliant system they designed has created a traffic jam around the index cards.

They figure it out.

Without me.

And increasingly, I think that’s the point.

Independence isn’t when students know all the answers. It’s when they trust themselves enough to figure out what to do when they don’t.

That little girl didn’t need to know the “right” way to assemble the kits.

She needed to BELIEVE she could look at the problem and create a way.

And she did.

Better than I would have.

There’s a strange thing about teaching children to think for themselves.

If we do it well, eventually they stop looking at us quite so often.

They stop asking, “What should I do?”

They start saying, “Here’s what we’re going to try.”

And every once in a while, the best thing I can do is stand there, keep my carefully perfected system to myself, and realize:

They’ve got this.