BONUS: Rethinking Certainty in Education - Why We’re Doing It All Wrong

In this S5E9 Schoolutions Teaching Strategies BONUS, I break down my conversation with Angela Stockman. Have you ever thought admitting "I don't know" would ruin your credibility as an educator? In this bonus episode, I share the vulnerable moment in 2006 when I believed saying those three words had sabotaged my career—and what actually happened next that transformed my entire teaching practice.

Building on my conversation with Angela about embracing uncertainty, this episode gives you three concrete moves to practice this week: how to pick ONE focal point to study all year, how to document observations without adding compliance burden, and how to share uncertainty in ways that build trust instead of destroying it.

What You'll Learn:
✅ Why performing certainty is ruining teacher credibility and causing burnout
✅ The three-move system for operationalizing uncertainty in your classroom
✅ How pedagogical documentation sustains your energy and curiosity
✅ Why "I don't know" gives students and colleagues permission to actually learn
✅ How to pair uncertainty with structure so it becomes productive, not paralyzing

This isn't about having all the answers—it's about having the courage to study what genuinely fascinates you about student learning. When we stop performing and start documenting, teaching transforms from survival mode to sustainable discovery.

Key Quote: "I don't have to be certain to be credible." - Angela Stockman

CHAPTERS:
0:00 - Introduction: The Power of "I Don't Know"
1:00 - My 2006 Career-Changing Moment
3:00 - When a Teacher Said "That's the Most Honest Thing I've Heard"
4:00 - How to Operationalize Uncertainty
5:00 - Move 1: Name One Thing You're Curious About
6:00 - Move 2: Replace "I Should Know" with "I'm Going to Study This"
7:00 - Move 3: Share Your Uncertainty with One Person
8:00 - The Unintended Gift: Documentation Sustains Your Energy
9:00 - Curiosity as the Antidote to Burnout
10:00 - Call to Action: Your Three Moves This Week

💫Check out linked episode mentions here:  https://www.buzzsprout.com/1890886/episodes/18106285

🚀📚 Watch the full S5E9  @schoolutionspodcast interview here (https://youtu.be/8omXvWmAPl0)

Join our community of educators committed to cultivating student success, inspired teaching, and creating inclusive classrooms with a pro-kid mindset focused on the whole child. When coaches, teachers, administrators, and families work hand in hand, it fosters a school atmosphere where everyone is inspired and every student is fully engaged in their learning journey.

📧 Connect: schoolutionspodcast@gmail.com
🎵 Music: Benjamin Wahl

Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE for more teaching tips, and 💬SHARE with fellow educators! 

#TeachingStrategies #TeacherBurnout #PedagogicalDocumentation #EmbracingUncertainty #TeacherCredibility #ProfessionalDevelopment #InstructionalCoaching #EducationPodcast #TeachingStrategies #StudentEngagement #ClassroomCulture #TeacherSupport #NewTeachers #InnovativeTeaching #EducationTransformation #TeacherImpact #EmpoweredEducators #WholeChild #ProKidMindset #InclusiveTeaching #EquityInEducation #CulturallyResponsiveTeaching #ActiveLearning #EffectiveTeaching #InstructionalStrategies #SchoolLeadership #TeacherMentors #CoachingStrategies #InspiredTeaching #StudentSuccess #ThrivingStudents #Schoolutions #SchoolutionsTeachingStrategies

When coaches, teachers, administrators, and families work hand in hand, it fosters a school atmosphere where everyone is inspired and every student is fully engaged in their learning journey.

Transcript

Welcome back to Schoolutions Teaching Strategies. This is a Friday bonus episode, and if you have not listened to my conversation with Angela Stockman yet, you need to pause this bonus, go back, and her episode is Stop Drowning in Data: Why Uncertainty Makes Us Better Educators. It's Season five, episode nine, right below this episode.

Listen to that and then come back to this content. If you have listened to that episode, you probably heard Angela say something that stopped you in your tracks, just like it stopped me. She said, “I don't have to be certain to be credible.”

Let that land for a second, because if you're like me, you were probably taught the exact opposite. We were trained as teachers to have all the answers, to write perfect objectives, to execute flawlessly, to know. Here's what I've been thinking about all week and since I had that conversation with Angela. [00:01:00] What if our need for certainty is actually what is killing our credibility with students, with our colleagues, and honestly with ourselves?

So today's bonus episode's a little different. I want to take you behind the scenes of my own journey with this idea. The moment I really thought that I'd sabotaged my career by admitting I don't know, and what happened when I didn't run from it. And then like usual, I'll give you three concrete ways to practice uncertainty this week that won't feel risky, but we'll start shifting how you show up in your classroom. Let's dive in together.

This is Schoolutions Teaching Strategies, the podcast that extends education beyond the classroom. A show that isn't just theory, but practical try-it-tomorrow, approaches for educators and caregivers to ensure every student finds their spark and receives the support they need to thrive. [00:02:00] 

All right, I need to take you back to a specific moment because this is where a lot changed for me. It was 2006. I had flown across the country. I was a brand new consultant and I really thought I had to know everything and feel like I was confident in what I was doing. I remember sitting with other consultants around the table that were much more experienced and had been doing the work longer.

I was working with kindergarten through third grade teachers. They were asking so many questions about the curricula, how it was designed, the structure of the day, the flow of the schedule, and I was so ill-equipped. I really didn't have the answers I should have, and instead of making up answers in the moment, I thought, I am just gonna tell them I don't know, and I will get back to them.

I really thought I had sabotaged everything. I was invited there to facilitate summer school for those grades, those teachers, [00:03:00] and I thought I let them all down. I let myself down. And I will never forget at lunch, a teacher found me and she said the words that I mentioned in the episode with Angela. She said, “I have never heard a consultant say they don't know.”

And I felt my stomach drop. Until she continued and said, “that's not a bad thing. That's the most honest thing I've heard all year.”

And then she said something that I will never forget, “If you can say, I don't know, maybe I can say it too.” 

And she went on, “Maybe I can stop pretending I figured it all out and actually learn what my kids need.”

So that moment - that for me was the beginning of me understanding what Angela was talking about in our conversation. Our certainty isn't serving us. It feels like performance. It's exhausting, [00:04:00] and it's preventing us from the actual learning that would make us better. But here's what I didn't understand yet back in 2006.

I did not understand how to operationalize uncertainty. How do you admit you don't know without losing trust? How can we study something without getting paralyzed by perfectionism? That's where Angela's work with documentation comes in, and that's what I'm excited to unpack today. 

Let's get practical though, because saying I don't know in a vacuum doesn't help anyone. What Angela taught me and what her main idea study that she described demonstrates is that we need to pair uncertainty with a system for learning. Here's what that looks like in three moves I think you can try practicing this upcoming week. 

Move one: Name, one thing you're genuinely curious about. Not everything. One thing Angela said to pick one focal point for the whole [00:05:00] year. The whole year. Let that sink in. Think about your teaching right now. What's one thing that keeps nagging at you? Maybe it's why do my students shut down during writing conferences? Or why does my classroom fall apart during transitions? Or why can three students explain the concept perfectly and 15 others look completely lost? Pick the thing that makes you the most curious, not the most frustrated, the most curious. There is a difference this week just name it, write it down, say it out loud to a colleague. I am genuinely curious about why blank keeps happening. That's it. That's move one.

Move two: Try replacing, I should know this with, I'm going to study this. Here's where the mindset shift happens and where it happened for me. When [00:06:00] that thing you're curious about shows up in your classroom this week. I hope you can catch yourself before you spiral into shame or scramble for a quick fix. Instead, say to yourself, this is my documentation moment. Remember when Angela talked to us about using Otter.aI in the car on the way home? You don't need fancy tools. You can voice memo yourself on your phone, jot three sentences in a Google Doc, or even take a photo of student work that exemplifies what you saw. But here's the key: you're not documenting to prove anything. You're documenting to notice. Ask yourself, what specifically did I see happen? What did the student say or do? What was my reaction and what might that tell me? This is what Angela means by pedagogical documentation. It's not compliance, it's curiosity in action.[00:07:00] 

Okay, here's move three: Share your uncertainty with one person. This is where courage comes in, but it's also where the magic happens. At the end of the week, share what you've been noticing with one colleague, one coach, or even one student. You could frame it like this: I've been studying (whatever your focal point is) this week because I am genuinely curious about it. Here's what I noticed (you could share one observation). I don't have answers yet, but I'm wondering if you've noticed anything similar. 

What Angela discovered and what I've seen over and over is that when we lead with uncertainty, other people bring their observations to the table. And suddenly you're not solving problems alone, you're in partnership. And don't forget what Angela said about the building principal who trusted teachers to say, we don't know. That trust created space for [00:08:00] teachers to actually study and discover solutions that worked, not because an expert delivered them, but because they emerged from real documentation of real students.

So to wrap this bonus episode, I want to connect this back to something else Angela said that I felt like I glossed over. She mentioned that documentation has an unintended gift. It sustains your energy for the work. I've thought about that a lot too. And here's what I think she means. When you're performing certainty all day, every day, when you're trying to get it right to prove your worth, to execute perfectly, you're not learning. You're surviving. And let's face it, survival is exhausting. 

But when you give yourself permission to be curious. When you document one focal point over the course of a year and watch patterns emerge, you're not just going through the motions teaching five sections of the same eighth grade class like she was.[00:09:00] You're fascinated by what you're discovering. Angela said it herself, “It keeps me curious. I always still feel very much like a learner.”

I think this could be an antidote to burnout: not more strategies, not more professional learning, but curiosity, documentation, permission to not know. 

And here's the beautiful paradox, when you stop trying to be certain about everything, you become more credible because you're present, you're listening, you're responsive, you're actually paying attention to what's happening instead of forcing what you think should happen. 

Your uncertainty isn't a weakness, it's your entry point to the kind of learning that actually transforms practice. Let's stop trying to be so certain together. Let's start getting curious and let's watch what happens. [00:10:00] Thank you for spending this time with me today. If this bonus episode resonated with you, share it with one colleague who needs permission to not have all the answers. Remember, documentation isn't about perfection. It's about presence. It's about curiosity. It's about giving yourself permission to learn. I’ll see you Monday for an amazing conversation with Larry Ainsworth about essential standards and how when we prioritize standards, it can save us so much time in the classroom to dig deep with our kids. Until then, stay curious, friends. Take care.

Schoolutions Teaching Strategies is created, produced, and edited by me, Olivia Wahl. Thank you to my older son Benjamin, who created the music playing in the background. You can follow and listen to solutions wherever you get your podcasts or subscribe to never miss an episode and watch on YouTube. 

Here's my invitation: send me an email, it's [00:11:00] schoolutionspodcast@gmail.com, and tell me one thing from this conversation that's shifting your thinking. Let me know maybe what your next step is. Try it and then circle back. Tell me how it goes. Maybe it's picking your one focal point, documenting it imperfectly, and then sharing your uncertainty with one person.

Here's what I know. This will not happen perfectly. We will forget to document some days. We'll feel silly talking into our voice memos, but that's okay because when we know what we want to study, when we notice, when we stop feeling and performing with certainty, we’ll feel a shift in our learning. 

And with that said, don't forget to tune in every Monday for the best research, back coaching and teaching strategies you can apply right away to better the lives of the children in your care. Stay tuned for my bonus episodes every Friday as well, [00:12:00] where I'll reflect and share connections to what I learned from the guest that week. See you then.