A few years ago, my daughter’s Destination Imagination team took on the Scientific Challenge.

Their solution included time travel, surprise endings, a trip to the planet K2-141b, and, as all good science-fiction stories apparently require, a mysterious button that absolutely should not be pressed.

In the original version of the story, the button was red.

Of course it was.

Red buttons practically exist to communicate:

DO NOT PRESS THIS BUTTON.

Which, in fiction, naturally means someone must press it immediately.

The team performed their solution at the regional tournament, did incredibly well, and won.

The red button had caused no problems.

No one suggested it needed fixing.

Then, after the tournament, I was talking with the mom of one of our newer team members. She had watched several other teams compete that day and was telling me how interesting it was to see all the different ways teams had interpreted the same challenge.

Then she mentioned something funny.

Almost every story had a red button.

Different teams.

Different plots.

Different solutions.

Red button.

Red button.

Red button.

I mentioned it to the team.

That was all it took.

Apparently, if everyone else had a red button, we most certainly could not have a red button.

The button became blue.

And one line in the script changed.

When Harleen noticed the mysterious button and asked what it did, Elaina answered:

“I don’t know, but it’s not red…”

Pause.

Eyebrow raise toward the appraisers.

“…so I’m gonna press it.”

It was a tiny change.

The entire story didn’t need to be rewritten.

The set didn’t need to be redesigned.

The team didn’t suddenly earn fifty bonus creativity points because they had discovered the color blue.

But something interesting happened.

The appraisers noticed.

At Destination Imagination tournaments, teams receive comments from the appraisers, virtual sticky notes, pointing out things they found funny, clever, impressive, or memorable.

And tournament after tournament, at least one appraiser mentioned the blue button.

Not just the button.

The fact that it wasn’t red.

I can imagine why.

After watching performance after performance, the red button probably starts to feel inevitable.

And then one team walks in with a blue one.

Better yet, they pause mid-performance, raise an eyebrow, and make sure you know that they know.

The team went on to win the state tournament and compete at Global Finals.

Did the blue button make that happen?

Of course not.

Was it the difference between a winning solution and a losing one?

Probably not.

But was it memorable?

Absolutely.

And I think that’s what I love about the story.

The red button wasn’t bad.

It worked.

It made sense.

The team had already created a successful solution around it.

They just learned that it was also the obvious choice.

And instead of saying, Good enough, they looked again.

That’s a different kind of creativity than coming up with the first big idea.

Sometimes creativity is invention.

Sometimes it’s taking something that doesn’t work and finding a way to make it work.

But sometimes creativity is looking at something that works perfectly well and asking:

Could this be more interesting?

Could it be more surprising?

Could it feel more like us?

Sometimes the first clue that an idea deserves another look is simply how easily we arrived at it.

Not because first ideas are bad.

Not because everything needs to be different for the sake of being different.

But because the idea that came quickly to us may have come quickly to everyone else too.

The following year, the team sat down at the beginning of the season to create our team norms.

They talked about how they wanted to work together, what mattered to them, and what they wanted to remember as they tackled another challenge.

The last norm they added was:

Look for blue button moments.

That’s when I knew the blue button had become something bigger than a funny line in a script.

They had developed their own shorthand for creative thinking.

Don’t stop just because it works.

Look again.

Where did we choose the expected thing?

Where might we push the idea a little further?

What could make this solution more distinctly ours?

Now I tell this story to my students when we begin brainstorming our first project of the year.

Eventually, they know the question is coming.

What’s your blue button moment?

I’m not asking them to make something weird.

I’m not asking them to decorate a perfectly good idea until it becomes “creative.”

I’m asking them to take another look at their thinking.

To notice where they’ve settled.

To wonder whether the first possibility has to be the final one.

Because creativity isn’t always a lightning bolt.

Sometimes it’s a second look.

A small change.

A willingness to ask one more question after you’ve already found an answer that works.

And every once in a while, it’s simply noticing the red button…

and deciding to make it blue.

Some of the teachers who eventually became our strongest champions of STEM education began as some of its biggest skeptics.

Of course they did.

Don’t we teach students to question everything?

Apparently, those teachers understood the assignment.

Okay, I’m not entirely sure that’s what they were thinking at the time. But still.

Our school was working toward STEM designation in Ohio, and our designation team participated in a series of professional learning experiences that became some of the best schoolwide professional growth I’ve ever experienced.

Because STEM designation wasn’t something a handful of science and math teachers could accomplish while everyone else cheered them on from down the hall.

Every teacher had to be part of the shift.

Math and science, obviously. But also reading. Writing. Social studies. Art. Music.

No subject was safe.

And I mean that in the best possible way.

We weren’t trying to add more STEM activities to the school day. We were trying to create a shift in learning culture.

One part of that shift was identifying the habits of mind we wanted students to carry across classrooms, across subjects, and eventually into their lives.

Our school adopted the 5Cs:

Creativity. Critical Thinking. Collaboration. Communication. Citizenship.

But as we talked about these habits, we started wondering:

If we say we value them, when are students actually supposed to learn how to use them?

Think about collaboration.

We put four students together during math and ask them to solve a challenging problem. We want them to collaborate, but they’re also trying to understand the mathematics, remember what they learned yesterday, interpret the problem, test strategies, and check calculations.

And we’re probably paying close attention to the mathematics too.

As we should.

So when does collaboration ever get to be the most important thing happening in the room?

Our professional learning inspired us to wonder what would happen if, every once in a while, we let the habit itself become the lesson.

Not for an entire unit.

Not even for an entire class period.

Just long enough to practice it.

So I began creating short design sprints teachers could use during morning meetings around events like STEM Day, Hour of Code, and Engineers Week.

For a few minutes, the academic content stepped aside.

The habit could simply be the habit.

Students could try something, struggle, disagree, change their minds, try again—and then talk about what their brains had just done.

What happened when your first idea didn’t work?

What happened when someone else’s idea changed yours?

What did your group do when you disagreed?

When did you suddenly see a possibility you couldn’t see before?

We weren’t studying creativity.

We were experiencing it.

And that distinction started to feel really important to me.

We don’t just want students to know what creativity is. We want them to recognize what it feels like when their own mind is being creative.

That’s metacognition meeting creativity.

Eventually, I brought a problem to my Discovery students, who had been practicing these habits in class since second grade:

How might we share what we’ve learned with the rest of our school?

Their answer was Mindful Monday.

Each week, students focused on one of the 5Cs during our morning announcements. They explained the habit, led the school through a one- or two-minute activity requiring no supplies, and encouraged everyone to notice that C throughout the week.

Where did creativity show up?

When did your group need better communication?

When did critical thinking help you solve something?

The students weren’t merely learning the culture.

They helped build it.

That’s agency in action.

It was service too. They had spent years developing habits that could now be useful to someone else.

And the teachers were practicing right alongside them.

Mindful Monday continues today because habits of mind don’t become habits simply because we value them.

Habits become habits because we practice them.

We understand this almost everywhere else.

Athletes repeat movements.

Musicians practice scales.

Readers practice decoding until they no longer have to think consciously about every familiar word.

So why would thinking be different?

Not worksheets about creativity.

Not vocabulary quizzes on collaboration.

Experiences.

Short, deliberate opportunities to practice a way of thinking and notice what your own brain is doing.

Maybe we’re building a kind of muscle memory for the mind.

And here’s the interesting contradiction:

Creativity isn’t a subject.

Neither is critical thinking. Or collaboration. Or communication. Or citizenship.

They’re ways of thinking, working, interacting, and participating in the world.

A mathematician notices a pattern nobody else noticed.

Creativity.

A historian looks at familiar evidence and asks a different question.

Creativity.

A student turns two whole numbers into a fraction and accidentally teaches his math teacher a new way to find the greatest common factor.

Definitely creativity.

Creativity belongs everywhere thinking happens.

And yet, maybe that’s exactly why it sometimes needs a few minutes of its own.

Those short design sprints were the practice field.

On the practice field, we could isolate a habit. Try it. Notice it. Talk about it. Try again.

Then we left the practice field.

School is the laboratory.

Now creativity has to show up in mathematics. Collaboration has to survive disagreement. Communication has to help someone understand an idea. Critical thinking has to appear when the answer isn’t obvious. Citizenship has to shape how we participate in a community.

And ultimately, even school isn’t the destination.

Life is.

Because someday there won’t be a teacher standing beside our students saying, “This looks like a situation where you should use critical thinking.”

No one will announce that today’s problem requires creativity.

There won’t be a rubric reminding them to communicate effectively.

They’ll encounter a problem, an idea, a disagreement, an opportunity, or something none of us can predict.

And they’ll have to decide what kind of thinking the moment requires.

That’s why I don’t think the 5Cs are really school skills at all.

They’re habits for navigating the world.

The design sprint is the practice field.

School is the laboratory.

Life is where they’ll need it.

We spend enormous amounts of time deciding what children need to know.

Maybe we should be just as intentional about deciding how we want them to learn to think.

Because if we’re serious about developing thinkers, then thinking itself deserves instructional time.

Which leaves me with a question:

What are we expecting children to know how to do that we’ve never given them the chance to practice?

I spent nearly two decades teaching middle school math, which means I’ve seen students solve problems in just about every way imaginable.

Some were elegant. Some were efficient. Some took the scenic route.

And some made me stare at the paper for a moment and say, “Okay…show me what you did here.”

Those were often my favorites.

One student in particular comes to mind.

Math was hard for him.

Really hard.

But he worked. He tried. He was sweet and always appreciative of help. He was the kind of student you found yourself rooting for because you knew how much effort was behind every success.

One day, we were working on greatest common factor.

I had taught my students multiple strategies. They could list factors using the rainbow method. They could use factor trees and prime factorization. We had tools.

Then this student gave me the correct GCF for two numbers.

Great.

“How did you get that?”

“I simplified my fraction.”

What?

There was no fraction.

We were looking at two whole numbers.

I could have stopped him right there. I could have reminded him that we weren’t simplifying fractions. I could have redirected him to one of the methods we’d practiced.

Instead, I was curious.

“Come show me.”

He walked to the board and wrote one of the whole numbers as a numerator and the other as a denominator.

Okay.

Now we apparently had a fraction.

Then he started simplifying it.

He divided the numerator and denominator by a common factor. Then another. And as he worked, he kept track of the numbers he had divided by.

When the fraction could no longer be simplified, he multiplied those divisors together.

There it was.

The greatest common factor.

I remember looking at it and thinking:

Wait.

Does that actually work?

There was only one reasonable thing to do.

I gave him another problem.

It worked.

So I tried another.

It worked.

And another.

It worked.

Every. Single. Time.

At this point, my math-teacher brain was fully invested.

Then he told me it worked with three numbers too.

Now he really had my attention.

“Show me.”

He wrote three numbers in a vertical line and did exactly what he’d done before. He found a common factor that could divide all three numbers, simplified them step by step, kept track of those divisors, and multiplied them together.

Greatest common factor of three numbers.

It worked.

Of course it worked.

At some point during this interaction, the roles in the classroom had quietly shifted.

I wasn’t teaching him anymore.

He was teaching me.

And his method was beautiful.

Not just because it worked mathematically.

It made sense.

Students already knew how to simplify fractions. His process connected a new concept to something familiar. They didn’t have to generate long lists of factors and worry about missing a factor pair. They didn’t need to build multiple factor trees and then compare prime factors.

They could use something they already understood to make sense of something new.

So the next year, when I taught greatest common factor, I taught his method.

And the year after that.

And the year after that.

Most students preferred it.

A strategy discovered by a student who struggled with mathematics became one of the most useful strategies in my classroom.

I think about that often.

Because there’s a subtle danger in teaching something we know well.

We know the methods. We know the efficient processes. We know what we’re looking for.

And sometimes that makes it incredibly easy to look at student work and ask:

Did they do it correctly?

But that’s not quite the same question as:

What are they thinking?

If I had only looked for the process I taught, I would have missed his mathematics completely.

His work might have looked wrong because there wasn’t supposed to be a fraction.

But he wasn’t confused.

He was connecting.

He had taken something he already understood and used it to make sense of something new.

Isn’t that exactly what we want mathematicians to do?

Make connections. Look for structure. Recognize relationships. Use what they know to figure out what they don’t.

He didn’t reproduce my mathematics.

He made mathematics his own.

And I think there’s something important in that.

Creativity isn’t a subject.

We sometimes act as though students “do creativity” at certain designated times.

They create when they’re making art.

They create when they’re writing stories.

They create when they’re building something in STEM.

They create when we hand them an open-ended project and tell them to be innovative.

But I hadn’t given this student a creative math task.

I hadn’t said, Find an innovative new method for calculating GCF.

I taught him mathematics.

And then his brain connected it differently.

He took what he’d learned about simplifying fractions, recognized a mathematical relationship, tested it, generalized it to three numbers, and created a process that made sense to him.

That’s mathematical creativity.

Maybe creativity isn’t something we need to add to the curriculum.

Maybe it’s something we need to learn to recognize when it appears.

Because it can show up anywhere.

In mathematics.

In science.

In history.

In the way a child organizes information.

In the question they ask.

In the connection they make.

In a process no one taught them.

Meraki is about putting something of yourself into what you create.

Apparently, meraki can show up in GCF too.

I love that.

Because his process carried something of him. It reflected what he understood, how he made connections, and the way his mind had found a path through the mathematics.

And if I had been too focused on whether he followed the process I taught, I might have corrected the very thinking I should have been celebrating.

That’s stayed with me.

When a student’s work doesn’t look the way I expect, I try not to begin with:

“That’s not how you do it.”

I want to begin with:

“Show me.”

Because an answer can tell me whether a student landed in the right place.

Their thinking tells me something much more interesting.

It tells me how they traveled.

An answer tells me where you landed. Your thinking tells me how you got there.

That student showed me a path I hadn’t considered.

Then I spent years showing his path to other students.

I can’t help but wonder how many other beautiful ideas are hiding in student work that doesn’t look quite the way we expected.

What might we discover if we stopped looking for our process and started looking for their thinking?

I am very good at helping.

I’m a teacher.

It’s practically an occupational hazard.

I can spot a problem from across a classroom and immediately start generating solutions.

Maybe point something out.

Offer a tool.

Give them a piece of information they’re missing.

Surely I can make this easier.

Right?

Then my daughter joined Destination Imagination.

I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

She started DI in fourth grade. When I signed her up, there was a little box asking whether I would be willing to help.

Of course I checked it.

I am a helpful person.

A few weeks later, I received an email that essentially said:

“Hi, Team Managers! Here’s your team!”

Oof.

Apparently I had volunteered to be in charge.

And that’s how my co-manager and I, neither of whom had ever done Destination Imagination, ended up with six third, fourth, and fifth graders in my house every week for two hours attempting to build a working roller coaster inside a six-foot-by-six-foot space.

No one knew what they were doing.

The children didn’t.

We didn’t.

It was perfect.

If you’ve never experienced Destination Imagination, there’s one rule you need to understand.

Adults cannot contribute to the team’s solution.

Not a little.

Not a suggestion.

Not a “You know what I would do?”

Not a strategically raised eyebrow while staring directly at the obviously questionable part of the design.

Not. A. Single. Solution.

If an adult contributes to the solution, the team can lose points for interference.

We could teach skills. We could ask questions. We could help students learn how to use tools safely.

But the solution has to belong entirely to them.

I thought I understood this rule.

Then the children decided to build a spiral.

Their roller coaster would be scored partly on length and speed, and somewhere along the way, six elementary students decided that one part of their design should be a handmade spiral squeezed onto a two-foot-by-two-foot square.

I knew this was a terrible idea.

I mean, I knew.

I could see all the problems.

It was going to be difficult to construct.

It was going to take forever.

It was going to require an absurd level of precision for a group of elementary students working with the materials they had.

And the biggest problem?

What if it didn’t work?

We had a competition coming.

Time mattered.

If they spent weeks building this thing and discovered at the end that the golf ball couldn’t make it through, we couldn’t get those weeks back.

Every practical adult instinct I had was screaming:

Please abandon the spiral.

But I couldn’t tell them that.

So they kept going.

For nearly two months.

Two months of sketching, measuring, cutting, testing, adjusting, hot-gluing, and rebuilding.

And approximately 400 Band-Aids.

And ice packs.

So many ice packs.

Meanwhile, I sat nearby thinking about the calendar.

And biting my tongue.

There were moments when I desperately wanted to redirect them.

I was allowed to ask questions, and questions can be incredibly powerful.

But even there, I began to realize I had to be careful.

Maybe my guiding question moves them forward.

But maybe it moves them toward my idea of forward.

That distinction has stayed with me.

Because I didn’t just risk solving the problem for them.

I risked squashing the creativity that might lead somewhere I couldn’t see yet.

So the spiral continued.

And here’s the part that still makes me laugh.

It worked.

Not barely.

Not “Well, at least they learned something.”

It worked spectacularly.

The spiral wasn’t their entire roller coaster, but it became its most successful feature.

That two-foot-by-two-foot square contained 37 feet of track.

Thirty-seven.

Feet.

The feature I had spent two months quietly worrying was going to waste their time ended up adding so much length to their roller coaster that their design blew the others out of the water.

That first-year team went to the regional tournament.

They won.

Then they went to the state tournament.

They won again.

And suddenly, the six children whose spiral I would have actively and enthusiastically squashed if anyone had given me permission were headed to Global Finals.

On the strength of THEIR ideas.

Not mine.

Especially not mine.

I wish I could tell you that one experience immediately cured me of the instinct to jump in and help.

It did not.

I’m a work in progress.

But Destination Imagination has spent years providing me with increasingly convincing evidence that children are capable of extraordinary things when adults stop deciding what extraordinary is supposed to look like.

My daughter’s team kept competing.

They kept qualifying for Global Finals.

And year after year, some of the ideas that made their solutions remarkable were precisely the ideas I probably would have questioned, redirected, simplified, or loudly steered away from.

Fast forward to my daughter’s seventh-grade year.

By then, her team was an all-girls team competing in the Technical Challenge.

And apparently, several years of being left to their own devices had not made their ideas any less unusual.

Their solution included something called an Infinite Bacon Pig.

Yes.

An Infinite Bacon Pig.

I’m going to leave that right there.

That all-girls middle school team went to Global Finals and finished third in the world.

Third.

In the world.

At some point, a person has to consider the possibility that maybe the ideas she wouldn’t have approved are doing just fine without her approval.

The spiral hadn’t been a fluke.

Year after year, I watched these kids create solutions I wouldn’t have thought of and, in some cases, probably wouldn’t have encouraged.

Eventually, I had to confront something uncomfortable.

Expertise comes with assumptions.

As adults, we look at problems through everything we’ve already learned.

Experience tells us what’s practical.

What’s efficient.

What’s likely to work.

What’s probably a waste of time.

And that expertise is valuable.

But it can also narrow the field of possibilities before children have had the chance to explore it.

Sometimes children can imagine possibilities precisely because nobody has taught them yet why those possibilities supposedly won’t work.

And then every once in a while…

they build the spiral anyway.

I think about that spiral often when I’m teaching.

Because helping feels like such an obviously good thing.

A child struggles.

We know something that could make the struggle easier.

Why wouldn’t we help?

Sometimes we absolutely should.

Children need instruction. They need feedback. They need encouragement. They need tools, knowledge, examples, and support.

But I’ve started asking myself a much harder question:

When does helping stop being helpful?

Every time I step in, I change what happens next.

Maybe I save a student twenty minutes of frustration.

But maybe I also remove twenty minutes of experimenting.

Maybe I prevent a failure.

But maybe I also prevent the discovery that would have followed it.

And maybe my perfectly crafted guiding question moves the thinking forward.

But I have to ask myself:

Forward toward what?

Toward their idea?

Or mine?

That’s the part Destination Imagination forced me to confront.

I used to think productive struggle meant giving students enough time to work through something difficult without rescuing them too quickly.

I still believe that.

But now I think there’s another kind of productive struggle made especially for teachers. That’s much harder for me to work through.

It’s the kind where I don’t know where they’re going.

It’s one thing to watch a child struggle toward a solution I already know will work. I can stand back feeling relatively confident that they’ll eventually get there.

It’s another thing entirely to watch them invest two months in a spiral I’m fairly certain is going to fail.

That’s when autonomy gets uncomfortable.

When I can’t predict the solution.

When their path looks inefficient, strange, or completely ridiculous to me.

When I’m watching the calendar and wondering whether we’re about to lose two months of work.

When everything I’ve learned through experience is telling me to intervene.

And I choose to leave room for the possibility that I might be wrong.

That’s much harder.

It also creates possibilities I could never design for them.

Destination Imagination taught me something I thought I already understood about student agency.

Giving children autonomy doesn’t mean giving them freedom to arrive at the solution I would have chosen.

It means accepting that they may choose a solution I would never have approved.

And then having enough humility to admit that it might be better.

That’s difficult for adults.

We have experience.

We have expertise.

We can see mistakes coming.

We want to protect children from wasting time, being frustrated, and failing.

But maybe efficiency isn’t always the goal.

Maybe sometimes the two months matter.

Maybe the wrong turns matter.

Maybe the arguments matter.

Maybe even the Band-Aids and ice packs matter.

Because when that roller coaster finally worked, those six children didn’t have to wonder whose idea it was.

It was theirs.

Completely.

I hadn’t saved them.

I hadn’t redirected them.

I hadn’t even believed in the spiral.

They did.

And they were right.

Years later, I still have to resist the urge to help.

But now, when I see a student heading toward a solution I would never choose, I try to remember a two-foot-by-two-foot square containing 37 feet of track, six determined children, and a teacher sitting nearby who was absolutely certain this was not going to end well.

Sometimes the best thing I can contribute to a child’s thinking…

is enough space for it to become something I never imagined.

And if I ever forget that, apparently there’s an Infinite Bacon Pig somewhere in the world ready to remind me.

When does helping stop being helpful?

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?