The Question Schools Should Never Stop Asking

Academically, what do students need me for? If you didn’t pause to answer that question, I encourage you to at least track the thoughts that are fluttering in your brain right now.

It’s a question that has been brewing for me for a few reasons. The first is in thinking about my own classroom. Now that we are over a month into the new school year, there are a few students who are struggling. And I find myself asking, What can I do better? I am also thinking about it from a broader perspective of 21st century Christian schools, in general. What do students need us for?

The answer to that question has absolutely morphed from my early years of teaching. If I am being honest, the best way to describe my former role in the classroom would be a liaison of content from the textbook to students. The textbook told me what mattered, I delivered it, and then I created an assessment to see who had been paying attention or who studied.  

At this point, I am hoping none of you answered the opening question with “as a liaison of content from the textbook to students.” But I wonder how many of our practices might still fall under that umbrella.  

Please understand that content absolutely matters! A lot! Without important background information, students are unable to analyze, reason, interpret, solve problems, think critically, etc. 

But because access to content has changed dramatically, the role teachers play in helping students learn also has changed.  Students no longer need me to provide access to facts or tell them whether they arrived at the correct answer. Consider the situations below:

• Students don’t need me to tell them the Civil War started in 1861; they can ask Siri.

• Students don’t need me to tell them if they got the right answer to a math problem; they can go to apps like Photomath.

• Students don’t need me to explain Newton’s Second Law; generative AI can do that, too.

• They don’t need me to see if they answered a multiple choice, true/false, or fill-in-the-blank answer correctly; answers to questions like those are more accessible than at any other point in history.

So the question becomes even more important: What do students need me for?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the answer can be found in the requests I hear from students most often.

Show me what quality looks like.

Students need us to make quality visible. This is especially obvious in student writing. Telling a student to “write a strong analysis” is not especially helpful if the student has no idea what strong analysis actually looks like.

Students need clear success criteria, strong examples, and opportunities to compare their own work against quality work so they can begin to recognize the difference.

The same is true far beyond writing. What does strong mathematical reasoning look like? What makes a historical interpretation convincing? What makes a scientific explanation effective? What separates a technically correct performance from a polished one? Students need someone who can help them see those differences. A score alone can’t do that.

Show me how an expert approaches the work, especially the thinking.

Of course, “expert” might feel generous on some days, but teachers do develop ways of seeing a discipline that students simply do not have yet.  An experienced writer rereads a sentence and instinctively notices when something sounds awkward. A mathematician recognizes when an answer seems unreasonable. A historian naturally considers who created a source, when it was created, and what perspective might shape it. A scientist looks at a set of data and begins searching for patterns, outliers, and possible explanations.

Students do not naturally see those things. They need us to slow the process down and make our thinking visible.

Sometimes that means modeling. Sometimes it means thinking aloud. Sometimes it means showing students several possible approaches and explaining why one might work better than another. Sometimes it simply means saying, “Here is what I notice first, and here is why.”  Students do not just need to see our answers. They need to see how we got there.

Help me when I can't do it yet.

The word yet matters because learning is messy. Students  should be tasked with work they cannot complete independently. They misunderstand directions, choose ineffective strategies, get halfway through a task, and do not know where to go next.

They need teachers who can recognize where the breakdown is occurring and provide just enough support to help them keep moving.

Sometimes that support is a graphic organizer. Sometimes it is a sentence frame. Sometimes it is breaking a complex process into smaller steps. Sometimes it is asking the right question instead of simply giving the answer. And sometimes it is pulling support away because the student is ready to do more independently.

Tell me what to do next to get better.

This may be the most important one.

Students need feedback that helps them improve, not just a percentage, a “good job,” or a reminder to “study harder next time.”

They need to know what they can currently do, where their thinking or performance is breaking down, and what action would help move them forward.

There is a massive difference between telling a student, “You earned a 72%.” and “You are finding strong evidence, but your explanation is not yet showing how that evidence supports your claim. Let’s work on that connection.” One statement reports performance. The other helps the student understand what to do next.

That kind of feedback is only possible when we are clear about what we want students to become better at. We have to know what quality looks like, what skills matter most, and what progress actually looks like over time. Content still matters deeply, but the goal cannot simply be that students know more. We also have to ask what they are learning to do with what they know. 

And this is where the question becomes bigger than any one classroom. If we believe students need teachers to model, scaffold, coach, and provide meaningful feedback, then that belief should shape how each school defines quality teaching. That is the purpose of an educational philosophy.

A living educational philosophy is not a collection of nice-sounding statements. It is a shared set of beliefs that actually shows up in curriculum, instruction, assessment, feedback, and student support. It gives a school a common understanding of what students need from the adults who teach them and what quality learning should look like across classrooms.

Which brings us back to where we started, only this time with a bigger lens: What do students need our school for? For every faculty, the conversation around that question matters just as much as how you answer it. 

(To all the grammar teachers out there: I sincerely apologize for the excessive ending-a-sentence-with-a-preposition violations. This was solely for rhetorical effect.)

Ready to answer that big question for your school?

Set up a call with Ryan by emailing him at ryan.kirchoff@blueprint-schools.com. He’ll walk through how developing an educational philosophy is the starting point for transforming education into what today’s students really need.