For architecture and engineering lessons, Ron had his students create blueprints for a house. When he required them to do at least four different drafts, other teachers warned him that younger students would become discouraged. Ron disagreed—he had already tested the concept with kindergarteners and first graders in art. Rather than asking them to simply draw a house, he announced, “We’ll be doing four different versions of a drawing of a house.”

Some students didn’t stop there; many wound up deciding to do eight or ten drafts. The students had a support network of classmates cheering them on in their efforts. “Quality means rethinking, reworking, and polishing,” Ron reflects. “They need to feel they will be celebrated, not ridiculed, for going back to the drawing board. . . . They soon began complaining if I didn’t allow them to do more than one version.”

Ron wanted to teach his students to revise their thinking based on input from others, so he turned the classroom into a challenge network. Every week—and sometimes every day—the entire class would do a critique session. One format was a gallery critique: Ron put everyone’s work on display, sent students around the room to observe, and then facilitated a discussion of what they saw as excellent and why. This method wasn’t used only for art and science projects; for a writing assignment, they would evaluate a sentence or a paragraph. The other format was an in-depth critique: for a single session, the class would focus on the work of one student or group. The authors would explain their goals and where they needed help, and Ron guided the class through a discussion of strengths and areas for development. He encouraged students to be specific and kind: to critique the work rather than the author. He taught them to avoid preaching and prosecuting: since they were sharing their subjective opinions, not objective assessments, they should say “I think” rather than “This isn’t good.” He invited them to show humility and curiosity, framing their suggestions in terms of questions like “I’d love to hear why . . .” and “Have you considered . . .”

The class didn’t just critique projects. Each day they would discuss what excellence looked like. With each new project they updated their criteria. Along with rethinking their own work, they were learning to continually rethink their standards. To help them further evolve those standards, Ron regularly brought in outside experts. Local architects and scientists would come in to offer their own critiques, and the class would incorporate their principles and vocabularies into future discussions. Long after they’d moved on to middle and high school, it was not uncommon for former students to visit Ron’s class and ask for a critique of their work.

As soon as I connected with Ron Berger, I couldn’t help but wish I had been able to take one of his classes. It wasn’t because I had suffered from a lack of exceptional teachers. It was because I had never had the privilege of being in a classroom with a culture like his, with a whole room of students dedicated to questioning themselves and one another.

Ron now spends his days speaking, writing, teaching a course for teachers at Harvard, and consulting with schools. He’s the chief academic officer of EL Education, an organization dedicated to reimagining how teaching and learning take place in schools. Ron and his colleagues work directly with 150 schools and develop curricula that have reached millions of students.

At one of their schools in Idaho, a student named Austin was assigned to make a scientifically accurate drawing of a butterfly. This is his first draft:

Austin’s classmates formed a critique group. They gave him two rounds of suggestions for changing the shape of the wings, and he produced his second and third drafts. The critique group pointed out that the wings were uneven and that they’d become round again. Austin wasn’t discouraged. On his next revision, the group encouraged him to fill in the pattern on the wings.

For the final draft, Austin was ready to color it in. When Ron showed the completed drawing to a roomful of elementary school students in Maine, they gasped in awe at his progress and his final product.

I gasped, too, because Austin made these drawings when he was in first grade.

Seeing a six-year-old undergo that kind of metamorphosis made me think again about how quickly children can become comfortable rethinking and revising. Ever since, I’ve encouraged our kids to do multiple drafts of their own drawings. As excited as they were to see their first draft hanging on the wall, they’re that much prouder of their fourth version.

Few of us will have the good fortune to learn to draw a butterfly with Ron Berger or rewrite a textbook with Erin McCarthy. Yet all of us have the opportunity to teach more like them. Whomever we’re educating, we can express more humility, exude more curiosity, and introduce the children in our lives to the infectious joy of discovery.

I believe that good teachers introduce new thoughts, but great teachers introduce new ways of thinking. Collecting a teacher’s knowledge may help us solve the challenges of the day, but understanding how a teacher thinks can help us navigate the challenges of a lifetime. Ultimately, education is more than the information we accumulate in our heads. It’s the habits we develop as we keep revising our drafts and the skills we build to keep learning.

CHAPTER 10

That’s Not the Way We’ve Always Done It

   Building Cultures of Learning at Work

    If only it weren’t for the people . . . earth would be an engineer’s paradise.

—Kurt Vonnegut

As an avid scuba diver, Luca Parmitano was familiar with the risks of drowning. He just didn’t realize it could happen in outer space.

Luca had just become the youngest astronaut ever to take a long trip to the International Space Station. In July 2013, the thirty-six-year-old Italian astronaut completed his first spacewalk, spending six hours running experiments, moving equipment, and setting up power and data cables. Now, a week later, Luca and another astronaut, Chris Cassidy, were heading out for a second walk to continue their work and do some maintenance. As they prepared to leave the airlock, they could see the Earth 250 miles below.

After forty-four minutes in space, Luca felt something strange: the back of his head seemed to be wet. He wasn’t sure where the water was coming from. It wasn’t just a nuisance; it could cut off communication by shorting out his microphone or earphones. He reported the problem to Mission Control in Houston, and Chris asked if he was sweating. “I am sweating,” Luca said, “but it feels like a lot of water. It’s not going anywhere, it’s just in my Snoopy cap. Just FYI.” He went back to work.

The officer in charge of spacewalks, Karina Eversley, knew something was wrong. That’s not normal, she thought, and quickly recruited a team of experts to compile questions for Luca. Was the amount of liquid increasing? Luca couldn’t tell. Was he sure it was water? When he stuck out his tongue to capture a few of the drops that were floating in his helmet, the taste was metallic.

Mission Control made the call to terminate the spacewalk early. Luca and Chris had to split up to follow their tethers, which were routed in opposite directions. To get around an antenna, Luca flipped over. Suddenly, he couldn’t see clearly or breathe through his nose—globs of water were covering his eyes and filling his nostrils. The water was continuing to accumulate, and if it reached his mouth he could drown. His only hope was to navigate quickly back to the airlock. As the sun set, Luca was surrounded by darkness, with only a small headlight to guide him. Then his comms went down, too—he couldn’t hear himself or anyone else speak.

Luca managed to find his way back to the outer hatch of the airlock, using his memory and the tension in his tether. He was still in grave danger: before he could remove his helmet, he would have to wait for Chris to close the hatch and repressurize the airlock. For several agonizing minutes of silence, it was unclear whether he would survive. When it was finally safe to remove his helmet, a quart and a half of water was in it, but Luca was alive. Months later, the incident would be called the “scariest wardrobe malfunction in NASA history.”

The technical updates followed swiftly. The spacesuit engineers traced the leak to a fan/pump/separator, which they replaced moving forward. They also added a breathing tube that works like a snorkel and a pad to absorb water inside the helmet. Yet the biggest error wasn’t technical—it was human.

When Luca had returned from his first spacewalk a week earlier, he had noticed some droplets of water in his helmet. He and Chris assumed they were the result of a leak in the bag that provided drinking water in his suit, and the crew in Houston agreed. Just to be safe, they replaced the bag, but that was the end of the discussion.