What If Every Student Was Thinking in School? Rydell Harrison Reflects on His Building Thinking Classrooms Conference Keynote Address

 

What if every student in every class in every school was thinking? Not compliant, not busy, not simply completing tasks, not waiting for the smartest student to answer, but truly thinking?

Rydell Harrison, a Partners program coordinator, asked 800 educators to contemplate this question during his keynote address at the recent Building Thinking Classrooms (BTC) Conference in New Haven, CT.

Rydell went on to ask educators to suspend reality for a moment and create space to imagine the “adjacent possible”—a reality that does not yet exist but is within the realm of possibility. He said our ability to imagine that adjacent possible is tied to what we believe people are capable of.

For Rydell, this means examining the assumptions educators carry about students, particularly assumptions that frame performance gaps as evidence of limitations in students rather than limitations in the systems surrounding them.

Students Already Know How to Think

The premise behind Building Thinking Classrooms is that students already know how to think; the work is for adults to examine their beliefs about who is capable of thinking.

“The tragedy is not that our children are unable to think,” Rydell says. “The tragedy is that too many of our students learn that school is not the place where their thinking is wanted.”

When schools teach students to stop questioning, exploring, and making their thinking visible, the consequences extend beyond their academic development.

“Marginalized students are already surrounded by messages designed to limit who they believe they can become and what they are capable of,” Rydell says. “We would be naive to believe that this ‘unthinking phenomenon’ impacts groups of students proportionally.”

The Power of Student Voice

The same questions about trust and expertise that Peter Liljedahl works with in BTC arise in the work of student voice. Are educators willing to listen to what students are actually thinking about their schools?

“‘What if’ questions are great ways to explore the adjacent possible,” he says. “If we really think about their thinking, it opens up a different level of possibilities. What does it look like to have students practice that thinking with us?”

Centering student voice has the potential to transform an entire school or district. But doing so requires adults to be prepared not only to invite student voice but to genuinely hear it.

“It’s about the adult ears,” Rydell says. “How are we preparing ourselves to hear what we’ve not heard before?”

Sharing Power

Creating classrooms where students think, and schools where students’ voices matter, ultimately requires educators to share power.

“Students come ready to think,” Rydell says. “We dismiss a lot of their thinking and that teaches them to close off the thinking. It’s really our work that needs to happen, not just in motivating them to think but giving them ways to utilize their thinking to impact their lives. It will require us to share power.”

Rydell asks educators to consider how things might be different if, for 13 years, students spent 185 days each year practicing how to think and believing that their thinking is valuable.

He notes that revolution happens when young people see themselves differently—and that building thinking students can shift the status quo.

From Student Feedback to Student Partnership

Moving toward genuine student voice requires more than asking students to complete an occasional survey. Schools need systems for analyzing what students say—particularly students whose perspectives have historically been marginalized—and then finding meaningful ways to act on that information. For example, students can help design assignments, class norms, the look of the classroom, accountability systems, and more.

“The goal is to bring students into the work of co-constructing their educational experiences—socially, culturally, and emotionally. We want to bring them in to co-construct,” Rydell says.

When student voice is integrated into continuous improvement processes, it becomes another important source of information for educators alongside more traditional measures such as test scores. But more importantly, it gives students safe spaces to practice participating in decisions that affect their own lives.

Leadership Requires Humility

At the heart of this work is a fundamental question about expertise. Traditional models of leadership can equate positional power with knowledge. But becoming a school leader does not suddenly provide someone with knowledge of every student’s experience.

“I became a principal on July 1st, but everything I knew came with me from before June 30th. There’s not a sudden download once you get hired,” Rydell says.

Students possess a form of expertise about their own experiences that educators cannot acquire simply through professional experience.

“What’s in the way of sharing power? Leadership humility,” says Rydell. “You have to believe you don’t have all the answers and you have to be willing to create the conditions for people to see that you don’t have all the answers.”

Fixing Systems, Not People

Another important shift is moving away from locating problems in individuals and toward examining the systems in which they operate. Too often, schools treat people as problems to be solved, believing things would improve if we simply had the right teachers, students, or parents.

A different approach asks schools to change the system to fit the people, rather than trying to change people to fit the system.

Changing a system’s mindset is not easy. The first step is shifting participants’ thinking about where expertise lies, then creating experiences that allow them to see the value of student voice for themselves.

“We’re often asking people—both educators and students—to shift their mindset without giving them a new experience.”

Building Thinking Classrooms offers one way to create that new experience. If educators lean into BTC, they can begin asking what else might be possible—not only in classrooms, but in hallways, on bus rides home, and throughout the school experience.

Ultimately, the work comes back to the willingness to question what we think we know about students and to push against the assumptions that limit what we believe they can do.

“I Believe My Unbelief”

“I think one of the parts of the keynote I was most excited about is ‘I believe my unbelief,’” Rydell says

This is about recognizing the ways we are conditioned to believe what we believe. It’s acknowledging that our conditioning can lead us to believe that not all students can be trusted to really think. It’s admitting that we may have low expectations for some students—whether that is because of gender, race, special education designation, socioeconomic factors, etc.

Rydell believes that once we can see this, we can start to shift into the adjacent possible and suspend our current reality. We can say, I know I’m believing this, so help me push against it and open up a new narrative. We can say, as an affirmation, “I believe; help my unbelief” to help set aside the beliefs that constrain us.

So, what is the adjacent possible in schools? What could happen if every student in every class in every school was thinking? What else is possible if we really lean into BTC?

Rydell asks us to imagine thinking hallways. Thinking lunchrooms. Thinking bus rides home.

“What kind of democracy would we inherit if students lived this way?” he says. “First, we start with the thinking classroom.”

 

Watch a clip of Rydell’s keynote here: https://youtu.be/6MvT64WEw2M

View the entire keynote here: https://youtu.be/TRbD0dxt-Uc