My family loves Harry Potter. Our oldest borrowed more books from her school library last year than anyone else in the building, but Hogwarts is still her favorite world. She falls asleep to the voice of Jim Dale reading the audiobooks.
I watched the fifth film with her again not long ago, and took particular notice of a scene where Harry bests his friend Hermione in a lab assignment because he has a textbook annotated by a mystery figure. Hermione becomes frantic when the instructions in the book fail her.
Hermione has a hard time going off-text. We can all remember this book-smart student from high school, if we weren’t that student ourselves.
J.K. Rowling addresses the larger theme of her sixth story here. In the fictional wartime setting of the novel, Harry, Hermione, and all of their young friends face grave decisions for the first time in their lives. They will each break the rules and encourage that rebellion in one another to do the right thing.
The book is full of moments in which they learn to improvise.
The scene reminded me of a similar experience with my own father, the quietly gifted engineer. He had run into trouble installing a new kitchen faucet and asked me to look at the instructions. I eventually solved the issue by ignoring them.
I remember thinking whomever had written the instructions did so poorly and you could see the answer in the instructions only if you let go of them. I also remember wondering if my father was too beholden to the rules.
I don’t think this now. Dad accomplished too much as an engineer and a father not to grasp and use improvisation throughout his life. I’m sure there are many similar moments when I’ve needed someone to push me beyond the diagram.
I imagine this is more of a universal human flaw, and not even a flaw. I could’ve just as easily broken our faucet by ignoring the directions. One person’s daring is another person’s recklessness.
Still, I meet this important moment all the time while teaching my courses—the crossroads of formula and creativity. The students who struggle most with my open lessons want clear instruction—of course they do, in a classroom. But again this semester, one student called me on the “vagueness” of my assignments and then praised their “flexibility” once she struggled through the first few.
I found a better way to explain the intention behind my open assignments. I’m not assigning “instructions” at all; I’m assigning “prompts.”
It’s the perfect word, too. Prompt has a writing connotation, a computer association, and a physical or practical application. We all know “writing prompts,” where the task is nothing more than a stepping-off point. A command prompt is “a symbol or series of characters at the beginning of a line that indicates the system is ready to receive input.” And finally, in the worlds of performance and public speaking, “prompters” assist someone hesitating to speak on stage.
Which is exactly what I’m doing. In my classes, the goal is not to teach students one algorithm or correct way to do something, but to prompt them to find their own temporary, drafted processes—in words, but also online, on stage, and in life.
Teachers in all disciplines who want more creative classrooms should ask themselves, how often are my assignments instructions and how often are they prompts?
The goal should be 50/50.