A typical scene.
A child is busy working on an assignment. They stop, stare at the page and then say, “Miss, I don’t understand.”
The teacher looks over the work and responds: “You need to apply yourself.”
Next scene. Same child, this time at home.
“You need to work harder.”
In moments like these, I often wonder: work harder at what, exactly?
Does the teacher know? Does the parent know? More importantly, does the child know?
In my work with students, I have come to recognise that “I don’t understand” often translates to something else: I am stuck in my learning process.
And being stuck can mean at least three different things.
First, I don’t know enough. A child may lack the knowledge or information needed to complete the task.
Second, I don’t understand. The child may have the necessary knowledge but does not understand what is being asked of them.
Third, I don’t know how to proceed. A child may know the topic and understand the task, but still not know what to do next or which steps to take.
These three ways of being stuck are not the same. They have different causes and require different responses. The difficulty is that children themselves often do not know how they are stuck.
That is why simply telling a child to “work harder” is not particularly helpful.
These experiences have taught me two valuable lessons as an educator.
First, do not be too quick to diagnose a child’s learning behaviour. What we see is a child struggling, staring at the page, not starting or giving up. We see behaviour. We do not see thinking or root causes.
So, investigate.
What exactly don’t you understand? What do you think the assignment is asking you to do? What do you already know? Where did you get stuck? What do you think the next step might be?
Their answers give us evidence. Let the evidence guide what comes next.
The second lesson is perhaps even more important. Our job is not only to identify where students are stuck. We need to teach them how to identify it for themselves.
Teach them to stop, pause and investigate their own thinking. This is metacognition: teaching students to plan, monitor and evaluate their own learning. As Alex Quigley has argued, these are skills we need to explicitly teach if we want students to become increasingly independent learners.
More importantly, teach children what to do when they do not know what to do.
So the next time you hear a child say, “I don’t understand,” resist the urge to immediately tell them what to do.
Those words are a signal.
Pause. Ask questions. Help them investigate where they are stuck. Instead of simply giving them an answer, help them first understand what they need.
Because the goal is not only to help a child get unstuck today.
It is to teach them how to get themselves unstuck tomorrow.
