Think Again

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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www.CartoonCollections.com
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

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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

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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 teach his students to revise their thinking based on input
from others, so he turned the classroom into a challenge network. Every
week—and sometimes every day—the entire class would do a critique
session. One format was a gallery critique: Ron put everyone’s work on
display, sent students around the room to observe, and then facilitated a
discussion of what they saw as excellent and why. This method wasn’t used
only for art and science projects; for a writing assignment, they would
evaluate a sentence or a paragraph. The other format was an in-depth
critique: for a single session, the class would focus on the work of one
student or group. The authors would explain their goals and where they
needed help, and Ron guided the class through a discussion of strengths and
areas for development. He encouraged students to be specific and kind: to
critique the work rather than the author. He taught them to avoid preaching
and prosecuting: since they were sharing their subjective opinions, not
objective assessments, they should say “I think” rather than “This isn’t
good.” He invited them to show humility and curiosity, framing their
suggestions in terms of questions like “I’d love to hear why . . .” and “Have
you considered . . .”
The class didn’t just critique projects. Each day they would discuss
what excellence looked like. With each new project they updated their
criteria. Along with rethinking their own work, they were learning to
continually rethink their standards. To help them further evolve those
standards, Ron regularly brought in outside experts. Local architects and
scientists would come in to offer their own critiques, and the class would
incorporate their principles and vocabularies into future discussions. Long
after they’d moved on to middle and high school, it was not uncommon for
former students to visit Ron’s class and ask for a critique of their work.

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As soon as I connected with Ron Berger, I couldn’t help but wish I had
been able to take one of his classes. It wasn’t because I had suffered from a
lack of exceptional teachers. It was because I had never had the privilege of
being in a classroom with a culture like his, with a whole room of students
dedicated to questioning themselves and one another.
Ron now spends his days speaking, writing, teaching a course for
teachers at Harvard, and consulting with schools. He’s the chief academic
officer of EL Education, an organization dedicated to reimagining how
teaching and learning take place in schools. Ron and his colleagues work
directly with 150 schools and develop curricula that have reached millions
of students.
At one of their schools in Idaho, a student named Austin was assigned
to make a scientifically accurate drawing of a butterfly. This is his first
draft:

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Austin’s classmates formed a critique group. They gave him two
rounds of suggestions for changing the shape of the wings, and he produced
his second and third drafts. The critique group pointed out that the wings
were uneven and that they’d become round again. Austin wasn’t
discouraged. On his next revision, the group encouraged him to fill in the
pattern on the wings.
For the final draft, Austin was ready to color it in. When Ron showed
the completed drawing to a roomful of elementary school students in
Maine, they gasped in awe at his progress and his final product.
I gasped, too, because Austin made these drawings when he was in first
grade.

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Seeing a six-year-old undergo that kind of metamorphosis made me
think again about how quickly children can become comfortable rethinking
and revising. Ever since, I’ve encouraged our kids to do multiple drafts of
their own drawings. As excited as they were to see their first draft hanging
on the wall, they’re that much prouder of their fourth version.
Few of us will have the good fortune to learn to draw a butterfly with
Ron Berger or rewrite a textbook with Erin McCarthy. Yet all of us have the
opportunity to teach more like them. Whomever we’re educating, we can
express more humility, exude more curiosity, and introduce the children in
our lives to the infectious joy of discovery.
I believe that good teachers introduce new thoughts, but great teachers
introduce new ways of thinking. Collecting a teacher’s knowledge may help
us solve the challenges of the day, but understanding how a teacher thinks
can help us navigate the challenges of a lifetime. Ultimately, education is
more than the information we accumulate in our heads. It’s the habits we
develop as we keep revising our drafts and the skills we build to keep
learning.

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