Written by Several years ago, I encountered the concept of satisficing through Dave Stuart Jr. at an NCTE conference. Defined as doing work sufficiently to meet professional demands without risking one’s physical or mental health, this concept didn’t fully resonate until a few years later, in the early 2020s. At the time, the idea felt subversive in a profession where overextension is often normalized.
More recently, I attended a professional learning workshop led by MindFit titled The Perfect Trap: Helping Students Break Free from Anxiety & Overwhelm. This session addressed students’ social-emotional learning and mental health, offering practical strategies to address anxiety and perfectionism in the classroom. I was struck by how a concept learned what seems to be a lifetime ago, before pandemics, AI, and tariff wars, has come to frame innovation in teaching not as doing more, but as doing less, more intentionally.
In his now-iconic TED Talk, Sir Ken Robinson (2007) asserts that the fear of being wrong stifles creativity and risk-taking. Similarly, this sentiment is reflected in Growing Success’ (2010) definition of initiative as “the capacity for innovation and a willingness to take risks.” Evidently, innovation and risk-taking go hand in hand.
While Robsinson speaks of students, his logic applies equally to educators. When teachers operate from a state of overwhelm, their capacity to innovate and take risks is diminished. MindFit’s focus on student anxiety and perfectionism underscores this tension: innovation that increases overwhelm undermines its own purpose.
Ultimately, satisficing reframes the concept of innovation in educational spaces. While Runco (2004) notes that “innovation requires change,” yet change itself need not demand sacrifice: going the extra mile should be the exception, not the rule. Amid rising teacher attrition and increasing student anxiety, meaningful and sustainable innovation may depend less on constant novelty and the impulse to do more, and more on preserving what truly matters, connection and wellbeing, by doing less, but with greater intention.
References
Ontario Ministry of Education. (2010). Growing success: Assessment, evaluation, and reporting in Ontario schools (First edition, covering Grades 1 to 12). Queen’s Printer for Ontario. https://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/policyfunding/growsuccess.pdf
Runco, M. A. (2004). Creativity. Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 657–687. https://link-gale-com.proxy.queensu.ca/apps/doc/A114167293/AONE
TED. (2007, January 7). Do schools kill creativity? | Sir Ken Robinson [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY