August 24, 2026
By Eric Hollister Williams, Communications & Marketing Advisor
Listen to the Hooray For Monday podcast.
With the new school year now upon us, there’s one of the ABCDEs of Learner Needs that will be top of mind for many: competence.
Few people relish the feeling of not knowing how to do a thing. Whether it’s navigating the streets of a new city or creating pancakes from scratch, we crave having a sense of how we might problem-solve and come up with a solution. So often it comes down to competence and that uncomfortable stretch of not knowing and having to figure it out. This is where we develop a sense of direction and focus.
Just like healthy soil, developing a strong foundation from which something can grow is the work of learning and becoming competent – and out of that comes a real sense of confidence. One way to help students see that potential is by having them map their learning in the things they already know how to do well.
Consider a metacognitive exercise where students explore questions like:
- What are you good at already?
- How do you know?
- How did you get good at this?
- What do you want to get good at?
- How will you know you’ve achieved that goal?
- What might you have to do to get there?
Even better if these questions are part of a conversation students have with one another so they get to see how their peers are competent and where they want to grow as well.
We have all been subject to the alienating notion that everyone around us is more competent than we are. That’s rarely ever true; most of us struggle a great deal of the time. But it’s a perception that starts in schools when we don’t offer space to talk about what it feels like to not know how to do things and to puzzle through what we can do to change that.
2026 ABCDE Resource of the Week
Growing and Craving Competence
This reflection sheet and community-building activity can help your students start thinking about building their own competence. It’s useful for students to understand that even as they struggle to learn new things, they have had success in doing this before. Sharing their expertise with one another builds confidence and community. The conversations that come from activities like these also serve as good reference points for future connections.
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.
