Interrupting for good
Clyde Cole (far right), shares feedback with students during the MLK Jr Day Weekend 2020 Expedition.
Yesterday, during a facilitator huddle for our virtual Expedition, my friend, longtime collaborator, and Expeditionaries co-facilitator Clyde Cole said, “I feel like I’m losing my mind. Every time I go into a breakout room [on Zoom], the kids aren’t talking. But that doesn’t make sense, because they’re clearly producing work.”
So he decided to run an experiment.
Later in the day, he joined a breakout room while a team of students was working on their prototype. Silence. So Clyde turned off his video and his sound. Within a few moments, the students started yapping away. More to the point, they were talking about—and doing—meaningful work.
In other words, Clyde’s presence wasn’t necessary. (Not at that particular moment, anyway. His presence has certainly been meaningful at other times, as evidenced by the number of students who thanked him at the end of the day for helping them overcome obstacles.)
As he told the facilitation team, “I’ve spent my whole career ‘interrupting for good,’ but now I’m second-guessing myself.”
Those words resonated for me. Wasn’t I a teacher who wondered, What would my students do without me? Later that night, the point was driven home by words I read from Dutch social entrepreneur Jos de Blok:
“It’s easy to make things hard, but it’s hard to make things easy. Because that makes your job more interesting. That lets you say: See, you need me to master that complexity.” [1]
But what if the secret to being a great educator is doing less, not more? What if it means creating the conditions for students to do meaningful work [2]—and then getting out of their way?
When Clyde talks, I listen. Even after 30 years as an exceptional educator, he’s constantly reflecting, practicing, working to get better. Through his example—and yesterday through his candor—he clarified for me something about the future of learning:
If we have created the right conditions for students, maybe we shouldn’t be interrupting them.
Maybe we should be interrupting ourselves—for good.
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[1] Quoted in Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History.
[2] In an Expedition, we do this by focusing on 4 essential questions: Who am I? Who are we? What matters to us? What are we going to do about it?
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We are taking applications for our next virtual Expedition, August 3-7.
Deadline is July 17.
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