Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know Adam Grant (good books to read for beginners .TXT) 📖

through the semester, I invited the students to work in small groups to develop and pitch an idea for how we should spend that open day. Then they voted.

One of the most popular ideas came from Lauren McCann, who suggested a creative step toward helping students recognize that rethinking was a useful skill—and one they had already been using in college. She invited her classmates to write letters to their freshmen selves covering what they wish they had known back then. The students encouraged their younger selves to stay open to different majors, instead of declaring the first one that erased their uncertainty. To be less obsessed with grades, and more focused on relationships. To explore different career possibilities, rather than committing too soon to the one that promised the most pay or prestige.

Lauren collected letters from dozens of students to launch a website, Dear Penn Freshmen. Within twenty-four hours, dearpennfresh.com had over ten thousand visits, and a half dozen schools were starting their own versions to help students rethink their academic, social, and professional choices.

This practice can extend far beyond the classroom. As we approach any life transition—whether it’s a first job, a second marriage, or a third child—we can pause to ask people what they wish they’d known before they went through that experience. Once we’re on the other side of it, we can share what we ourselves should have rethought.

It’s been demonstrated repeatedly that one of the best ways to learn is to teach. It wasn’t until I let my students design a day of class that I truly understood how much they had to teach one another—and me. They were rethinking not just what they learned, but whom they could learn from.

The following year, the class’s favorite idea took that rethinking a step further: the students hosted a day of “passion talks” on which anyone could teach the class about something he or she loved. We learned how to beatbox and design buildings that mesh with nature and make the world more allergy safe. From that point on, sharing passions has been part of class participation. All the students give a passion talk as a way of introducing themselves to their peers. Year after year, they tell me that it injects a heightened level of curiosity into the room, leaving them eager to soak up insights from each of their classmates.

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JACK OF ROUGH DRAFTS, MASTER OF CRAFTS

When I asked a handful of education pioneers to name the best teacher of rethinking they’ve ever encountered, I kept hearing the same name: Ron Berger. If you invited Ron over for dinner, he’s the kind of person who would notice that one of your chairs was broken, ask if you had some tools handy, and fix it on the spot.

For most of his career, Ron was a public-elementary-school teacher in rural Massachusetts. His nurse, his plumber, and his local firefighters were all former students. During the summers and on weekends, he worked as a carpenter. Ron has devoted his life to teaching students an ethic of excellence. Mastering a craft, in his experience, is about constantly revising our thinking. Hands-on craftsmanship is the foundation for his classroom philosophy.

Ron wanted his students to experience the joy of discovery, so he didn’t start by teaching them established knowledge. He began the school year by presenting them with “grapples”—problems to work through in phases. The approach was think-pair-share: the kids started individually, updated their ideas in small groups, and then presented their thoughts to the rest of the class, arriving at solutions together. Instead of introducing existing taxonomies of animals, for example, Ron had them develop their own categories first. Some students classified animals by whether they walked on land, swam in water, or flew through the air; others arranged them according to color, size, or diet. The lesson was that scientists always have many options, and their frameworks are useful in some ways but arbitrary in others.

When students confront complex problems, they often feel confused. A teacher’s natural impulse is to rescue them as quickly as possible so they don’t feel lost or incompetent. Yet psychologists find that one of the hallmarks of an open mind is responding to confusion with curiosity and interest. One student put it eloquently: “I need time for my confusion.” Confusion can be a cue that there’s new territory to be explored or a fresh puzzle to be solved.

Ron wasn’t content to deliver lessons that erased confusion. He wanted students to embrace confusion. His vision was for them to become leaders of their own learning, much like they would in “do it yourself” (DIY) craft projects. He started encouraging students to think like young scientists: they would identify problems, develop hypotheses, and design their own experiments to test them. His sixth graders went around the community to test local homes for radon gas. His third graders created their own maps of amphibian habitats. His first graders got their own group of snails to take care of, and went on to test which of over 140 foods they liked—and whether they preferred hot or cold, dark or light, and wet or dry environments.

For architecture and engineering lessons, Ron had his students create blueprints for a house. When he required them to do at least four different drafts, other teachers warned him that younger students would become discouraged. Ron disagreed—he had already tested the concept with kindergarteners and first graders in art. Rather than asking them to simply draw a house, he announced, “We’ll be doing four different versions of a drawing of a house.”

Some students didn’t stop there; many wound up deciding to do eight or ten drafts. The students had a support network of classmates cheering them on in their efforts. “Quality means rethinking, reworking, and polishing,” Ron reflects. “They need to feel they will be celebrated, not ridiculed, for going back to the drawing board. . . . They soon began complaining if I didn’t allow them to do more than one version.”

Ron wanted to