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.
