Recently at a Duke TIP training about implicit bias, I was struck by how the recommended ways to overcome unconscious bias require something key, besides compassion and a commitment to social justice: curiosity. Getting to know people from other backgrounds and cultures, engaging in research, reading or watching resources outside your culture–all need a spark of interest to get us started.
I looked around the room with a lens of a seasoned teacher guestimating the return rate on optional homework (10-20%?), and wondered,
- Why don’t adults get to know folks outside their comfort zones?
- When do we lose our curiosity?
- How can we cultivate it so it’s a lifelong habit?
That led me to ask other questions about us as people and American culture as a whole.
- Are we as educators curious about our students?
- Are we as a society likely to reward curiosity?
- And if we aren’t, what does that mean? What are the consequences–continued implicit bias, for example?
Gifted youth are often naturally, voraciously, endlessly curious. They start out of the gate that way. How do we as educators nurture and prolong that curiosity?
Here are five ways to get our kids “curiouser and curiouser”!
How do you cultivate curiosity in your classroom? Share with us below!
#1: Model Curiosity
Does every unit kick off with an open-ended question? Does every unit end with one?
- If we make time to pose Essential Questions and give students the chance to speculate in the beginning of a unit and then draw conclusions, generalize, and theorize by the end, then we’ve framed our learning with curiosity.
- If we talk about our field or discipline in terms of “mystery,” “debate,” “ongoing issue,” “problem to solve,” then we invite students into the conversation every week.
- If we design summative assessments to answer an Essential Question, then the creative products and performances students do increase in complexity.
- The work of Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins (Understanding By Design) provides a rich set of resources to get started designing curriculum run by questions.
- Duke TIP eStudies (an online program for gifted 7th-11th graders) has adapted some of these concepts into a brief presentation to help you reconceptualize curriculum: assignments, discussion prompts, and other tasks.
- What if you added two days to a unit to bookend things, to allow for K-W-L, human timelines, graffiti boards, and other ways to process questions, so students can see where they begin and where they end with their understandings during a unit?
- What if some of your gifted youth started or ended class by sharing a Question of the Day? You can invite students to share questions they’re wrestling with from the news, from personal interests or hobbies, from school life, or other things that intrigue them.
#2: Teach the Art of Questioning
Are you and your students able to design good questions? And by good, I mean, open-ended, intriguing, stuff-I-wanna-investigate questions?
- Provide opportunities for students to generate Why, How, What If, and other open-ended queries about the subjects you’re learning, and opportunities to pose them and pursue them.
- In another post, “The Art of the Follow-Up Question,” we offer some models of questions to keep the conversations and investigations flowing.
- Stanford Teaching Commons provides a primer of a range of questions you might develop.
- How can you get students to write their own?
- How can a small sample of text, an image, an item to observe, a problem to solve, a piece of music, or any other intriguing prompt you provide, generate a list of questions?
- What if your students became discussion question creators, product task prompt creators, and fish bowl observers of discussion?
- What if peer review was driven by questions instead of compliments or critique?
- Check out our post on the Tuning Protocol as one method of handling ideas and proposals in your classroom through the use of clarifying questions.
#3: Allow Unstructured Discovery Time
Do your students have time to wander and dig deep?
- Wandering Time allows students to follow the things they wonder about. Rabbit Hole Time allows students to pursue a topic of interest and see how deep they can go. What if you used exit cards, warm-up journals, or other moments for students to jot down things they’ve always wondered, and then allowed time for research, independent projects, or other explorations of these questions?
- For accountability, ask students to return from these expeditions to report to their peers about the status of their wondering. One tangible outcome is to return with two or three unanswered questions that were discovered during the wandering or the digging, as well as the beginnings of an answer if they’ve found any.
- For more formal and prolonged expeditions, use independent study or investigation contracts.
- Gifted students tend to be day dreamers, go-getters, and diggers. Where do they have space to do so?
#4: Let Them Make the Rules
How do you cultivate agency in tasks so that students are eager to learn more?
- Are students setting personalized goals?
- Are they using means to track progress (the more visual, the better) and sharing that with you?
- Are they helping set the evaluation criteria?
- Are they part of a formal critique process where they help ask questions and give feedback?
Agency in product and performances begets curiosity which begets greater ownership.
#5: Teach Mindfulness
Questions bubble up when we slow down and get quiet.
I know that when I’m struggling with a difficult plot point as a novelist, getting up and wandering, while emptying my mind, is a huge help. I know that my physiology has much to do with how I process the world, and if I and my mind, muscles, and breathing are calmer, I can see things differently.
Do you make time and space for meditative thinking and mindfulness in your classroom?
Check out our post, “Silence the Classroom: Meditations to Quiet Your Gifted Students” and its suggestions for integrating mindful activity.
How do you cultivate curiosity in your classroom? Share with us below!
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