This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to episode 141 of the Cult of Pedagogy podcast.

In this episode, we're going to talk about how you can read your classroom of the phrase,

I don't know.

As teachers, we ask questions all the time.

And for most of us, it's not at all uncommon to hear students respond with, I don't know.

If we're offering them any kind of challenging instruction, we should expect that they're

not always going to know exactly what to say when faced with an academic question.

The problem is that I don't know, let students off the hook, allowing them to pass on an

opportunity to grow and handing that opportunity over to someone else.

For some students, I don't know becomes a crutch.

A get out of jail free card they use way too often to the point where they become almost

second-class citizens in the room, constantly taking a back seat and never really stretching

themselves.

The thing is, I don't know can actually mean a whole lot of different things.

It might be that the student doesn't know the material, but it might also mean that

they don't understand the question, that they didn't hear the question, or that they

don't understand one key term in the question.

It might be that they're too shy to answer, it might be that they have a guess, but they're

afraid it might be wrong.

Many of these are solvable problems, we just need to give students the tools to solve

them.

With those tools, students can give us a different response and actually keep participating

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