March 2, 2026
By Aleta Margolis, Founder and President
Listen to this week’s Hooray For Monday podcast for Aleta’s conversation with Maggie Jackson, a renowned author and leading voice on the many ways the world around us is changing. They discuss uncertainty and how this often-feared state of being is actually one with a wealth of benefits for learning, building community, and sparking curiosity.
Maggie Jackson
At the beginning of this school year, I wrote an issue of Hooray For Monday encouraging teachers to use the uncertainty of the moment—from “normal” new-school-year worries to the growth of artificial intelligence to navigating the presence of National Guardsmen on the streets of Washington, DC—as an opportunity for sparking curiosity and building community. In it, I quoted a passage from Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure by Maggie Jackson, a journalist who writes frequently about disruptive technologies:
“Jackson argues that Dr. King was saying, ‘We cannot find the best path forward…by assuming that we already know the way,’ and that he ‘responded to the vehement yeses and no’s of the moment with the courage of a maybe — the only call to action that fully confront the unknown.’”
Today, midway through the school year, this passage continues to resonate. As uncertainty increases, in DC and around the world, the need to meet it with “the courage of a maybe” increases as well.
And this is why I wanted to speak with Maggie about her deep research into the benefits of uncertainty.
Maggie is a long-time journalist whose work has been featured in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and NPR among many others and whose 2018 book, Distracted: Reclaiming Our Focus in a World of Lost Attention, led the charge on the conversations we’re having today about technology’s impact—for better or worse—on our lives. She is a leading voice on the rapidly evolving nature of our society and the perfect person to talk to as we all grapple with the challenges therein.
Maggie shared a wealth of insights teachers can use to support ourselves and our students in embracing the unknown—so much so that we will spend this week’s issue of Hooray For Monday and next diving into what Maggie calls “the space between question and answer.”
Listen to our conversation (below) and keep scrolling for key takeaways!
Experience Does Not Always Equal Expertise
Often, we attribute years of having successfully completed a task as evidence of skill. And of course, it is evidence of skill—at completing that task. But Maggie shares evidence that those who rely on routine to excel aren’t best-equipped to lend their brainpower to novel situations.
“When someone gets really good at what they do, they basically apply the old solutions even when things go wrong. Studies show that years of experience are only weakly correlated with skill and accuracy in many, many different professions. We’ve all seen that… A person who’s been there 100 years, and they’re really, really good, but when things go wrong, they go back to the same old solutions and that’s where they begin to fail.”
One of Inspired Teaching’s 5 Core Elements, Student as Expert, recognizes that students’ experiences, perspectives, and preferences are critical to an authentically engaging education and should be incorporated into lessons.
Vocabulary Around Uncertainty is Deficient
As teachers, we know words matter, and that holds true for how we talk about uncertainty—in general and our own. Rather than framing uncertainty as a negative or a threat, we should instead consider the benefits a specific moment of uncertainty may offer. Uncertainty can be a good stress.
“The language we have around uncertainty is really important. For instance, you can communicate that maybe this is a thorny problem, and we as a group need to sleep on it for a night, and therefore, we can come back with a range of possibilities. That’s progressive…what uncertainty does is open up the space between question and answer.”
Facing challenges — in school and everywhere in life — with resourcefulness, ingenuity, and optimism is how Inspired Teaching defines Imagination, one of our 4I’s.
Uncertainty is a Signal that Learning is Available
From brushing our teeth to our commutes to the meals we cook for dinner, our days tend to be consistent. When we encounter uncertainty, we often have a visceral reaction—butterflies in our stomachs, increased heart rates—that we interpret as fear. But it is actually our brains telling us something new is happening, and something new is an opportunity to learn.
“We are predictive machines, brain scientists call us. Our expectations and our assumptions carry the day. But uncertainty is a signal. Your uncertainty, your unsureness, is a signal that routine won’t be sufficient, and that there is something going on out there that demands time and effort and practice to unpack.”
Embrace Mistakes, one of the 5 Rules of Inspired Teaching Improv, requires teachers to intentionally seek out opportunities for learning from failure.
Hooray For Monday is an award-winning weekly publication of Center for Inspired Teaching, a social change nonprofit organization that champions the power of curiosity and is dedicated to transforming the school experience from compliance-based to engagement-based. Inspired Teaching provides transformative, improvisation-based professional learning for teachers that is 100% engaging – intellectually, emotionally, and physically.
