Knowing What You Don't Know

One of the most important things for a parent or a professional to know is what he or she does not know.  This can also be one of the hardest things for a person to understand.  For all of us, be you a parent, teacher, administrator, or other professional, it can sometimes be hard to admit that you don’t know something.  Yet to do so can often be the best thing you can do to help a child with a disability.  

  

To admit that you do not have all the answers can be incredibly difficult sometimes.  Sometimes it is a matter of ego, other times it may be a matter of your perception and insecurities about yourself, it may be concern over what others may think about you, and in some rare cases, it may truly be a degree of hubris that tells you that you truly do know everything that you could possibly need to know.  We always want to be perceived as competent in our particular roles with that child.  We never want others to walk away from us thinking we aren’t able to meet the needs of that child on whatever level we are involved.

   

For the parents, the willingness to admit and understand that they do not have all the answers can actually help to propel them to be better parents for the child and to be more successful advocates for that child’s educational needs.   Hopefully, that parental love will be the driver for parents to admit to themselves what they do not know.  A parent who can do this now has the opportunity to access information and to learn from those who do.  Just the willingness of a parent to say that he or she needs to learn more or that he or she does not understand something will often be a doorway to the information that the parent is seeking.  I have yet to see a professional turn away a parent who is seeking information that can help a child.  

  

Frankly, as a professional, and as a parent myself who has travelled these waters, I find that the parents who do the best job of advocating and helping to educate their child with a disability are those parents who, in evaluating their child’s needs, can say to the professionals in their child’s life that they need help and want to learn.  Those parents truly understand the need and will move heaven and earth to access and learn the things that they don’t know.  As I can attest, that process of understanding what you do not know and need to learn about never really ends.  It simply evolves into new areas as your child matures.

   

For a professional, knowing what you don’t know and owning up to that allows you to continually grow as a professional and to help the children you serve.  As we all know, it simply doesn’t do yourself or your students any good to operate without solid knowledge about the disabilities you may be seeing, what those disabilities may mean in the educational setting, and how you, as a professional can look to accommodate and serve that child so the child gets the best education you can possibly give.  I was once told by a teacher that she always looked at her students and asked herself what she would want for them if they were all hers.  Then she tried, as a professional, to give them just that.  This particular teacher said that yes, sometimes there were extra hours outside of work or on weekends doing research and learning, or sending emails to others who she knew had knowledge that she needed, or in some cases, sending emails to people she knew would know where to get information.  She told me that at the end of the day she could hold her head up and look anyone in the eye and say she was doing the best she could possibly do for her students.  She also said she was well past the point of worrying what someone thought about her if she said she did not know something or have information.  She figured that the fact she was admitting a lack of knowledge and then going and getting information to resolve the issue was more important, and would be viewed more positively, than just sitting there and saying and doing nothing.  As she put it, if that child was hers, she would expect more from herself and from those around her to make sure that child got an education.

   

So, how do you know what you don’t know?  A large part of the answer to that question is introspection and a willingness to constantly self-evaluate.  It isn’t a task for someone that has a huge ego or has low self-esteem.  Those two factors often make it hard to take that step into the deep end of the pool and look for your own shortcomings.  You have to be open to the possibility that you may not be perfect and that there may be information out there that you have not seen, and then have the courage to deal with that realization.  But that isn’t the only thing you have to do to know what you don’t know.  

   

Once you have identified areas where you do not have knowledge, are you willing to then go acquire it?  If you don’t acquire that new knowledge, just knowing that you don’t know something really isn’t going to help you or your students, is it?  Only then, when you have identified that there is something you know that you don’t know, and when you have collected and learned that information that you previously did not know, can you operationalize it for your students and provide a better learning environment for them.  

    

So, as a parent or a professional, if we really want to help the children learn, we have to begin by looking at ourselves and figuring out what it is that we know that we don’t know and then going out and learning ourselves.  How can we help that child with a disability if we do not take the time to know what we don’t know?  Everything starts at this point.   Take the time to look at yourself and ask that question.  The answers may surprise you and allow you to grow as a teacher, as a parent, and as a person.