This week marks the start of a new school year. The hallways are buzzing, Chromebooks are (hopefully!) charged, and the air is thick with that familiar mix of anticipation and nervousness.
As educators, we’re about to face a torrent of decisions. Decisions about curriculum, about management, about communication with families. It’s hundreds of daily choices that impact everyone.
We make these choices with the best of intentions. Our hearts are in the right place. But what if our information is biased, incomplete, or just plain wrong? Intentions, while golden, aren’t enough when a student’s progress is on the line.
In schools, we often chase absolutes. We search for the proven method, the silver bullet that will fix everything.
But the world doesn’t operate in certainties. Education, especially, doesn’t.
There’s a better framework, one borrowed from professional poker players and decision scientists like Annie Duke. (Check out her books Thinking in Bets and How to Decide – I read both this summer and they are amazing!) It’s the practice of thinking in probabilities. It’s understanding that every choice is a bet. It might work, or it might not. Our job isn’t to find the guaranteed winner, but to make the decision that gives our students the most favorable odds.
Thinking this way means asking better questions:
- What is the likelihood this intervention will actually work for this student?
- What are the potential upsides and downsides of this approach? (And what is the probability of each occurring?)
- What data do we have to support our hypothesis? (And more importantly, what data might we be ignoring?)
- What are the alternative paths, and what are their respective probabilities of success?
This is a fundamental shift from, “This will work,” to, “This has the strongest chance of working, based on what we know.”
After all, the highest probability isn’t a guarantee. Have you ever been caught in a downpour when the forecast showed only a 10% chance of rain? Sometimes, a well-placed bet with high odds just doesn’t pay off. That doesn’t mean it was a bad decision.
Learning is beautiful, messy, and unpredictable. Let’s embrace that. Let’s make our decisions not just from the heart, but with a mind trained to understand the odds.
Have a wonderful school year. May the odds be ever in your favor.
Rich
