Ways of Not Knowing

Last year, in preparation for a science topic I expected to be particularly abstract and challenging for my 6th graders, I spent a day helping them explore the “ways of knowing.”  If you’ve not heard that term before, the ways of knowing are exactly what they sound like - the different manners by which we as humans obtain knowledge.  I taught them about these seven:
​

They absolutely loved learning this, and spending a day on it did indeed make the intimidating science topic that followed go smoothly.

As I wrote in a recent post, I’ve spent much of this year focused on combating forgetting.  My students have been very interested in this (turns out they really enjoy thinking about thinking).  As part of teaching them about forgetting, I’ve taken great care to help them understand the difference between forgetting something, not understanding something, and never having learned something in the first place.  

Turns out there are ways of not knowing, too.

One of the ongoing battles of teaching and learning is the way students respond to missing something.  Most of the time, if a student misses something, they boil it down to something like:

• I’m dumb
• I’m bad at this
• I can’t do this

More frustrating still, this is the response regardless of the situation. 

Last week, I had to teach my classes how to find the measurements of all the angles in a construction like this one:
​

When this problem appears on a test, and a student gets it wrong, just think of all the possibilities:
​

Way of not knowing	Student’s explanation	Student’s action plan	Actual explanation	Actual action plan
I forgot the relationship between the two given angles	“I’m dumb / can’t do this / bad at this”	“I need to try harder” (not an actual action plan) ​	Forgot a fairly simple fact	Few minutes of memory work
I know how to do problems like this, but I used the wrong angle relationship	“I’m dumb / can’t do this / bad at this”	“I need to try harder” (not an actual action plan) ​	Knows the different angle relationships, but confused them	Few minutes of additional practice identifying situations
I know how the angles are related, but I don’t know the algebra	“I’m dumb / can’t do this / bad at this”	“I need to try harder” (not an actual action plan) ​	Missing skill from earlier in the year	Remedial work on missing skill; regression and progression
I know how to do this, I just made a mistake	“I’m dumb / can’t do this / bad at this”	“I need to try harder” (not an actual action plan) ​	Nothing	Nothing beyond pointing out the mistake
I never understood how to do this to begin with	“I’m dumb / can’t do this / bad at this”	“I need to try harder” (not an actual action plan) ​	Doesn’t understand the skill	More time and remedial work on the skill; regression and progression
I missed school when this was taught or this wasn’t actually taught	“I’m dumb / can’t do this / bad at this”	“I need to try harder” (not an actual action plan) ​	Never learned this in the first place	A chance to learn it

Notice, in every case, a student’s response is to “try harder,” which a) isn’t even a plan and b) isn’t the solution to the problem!  The actual solution to the problems, in most cases, doesn’t actually require much effort - they just require the right kind of effort.

Not knowing is a normal part of the learning process, but there are different ways of not knowing.  Most of the time, if a student knows why they don’t know something, the route to fixing it isn’t that difficult, and it has nothing to do with being dumb.

If you enjoyed this post, please share it!

Want to make sure you never miss a new post?  Subscribe below for email notifications of new content.

Want to read more right now?  You're in luck - you can browse past posts by category:

• ​Building A Thinking Classroom
• Leaning Into The Science and Engineering Practices
• Classroom Practices
• Classroom Stories
• Ideas and Opinions
• Pandemic-Related Issues​​