Merlin Mann stated that employees’ motivation increases when they get to “build a robot” once in a while. That is, do something creative beyond regular work. Can we do this at school? Offices have “casual Fridays,” can we have “curiosity Fridays?”
All AboutA Curiosity Guide
What do you know about curiosity? In this guide, you’ll learn about curiosity’s nature, its causes, how to coax it out of students, and how you might accidentally be destroying it.
Puzzlement Tournament
Perfect to wrap up the year: a four-round puzzlement tournament.
Curiosity 6: Recipes for Curiosity
As we wrap up our curiosity guide, I share three recipes to help you cook up curiosity in your classroom.
Curiosity 5: Curiosity Is Slow
We’ve been digging into curiosity, and now we come to curiosity’s big downside: it’s slow. Let’s look at how films take their time to establish an audience’s interest before revealing the real conflict.
Curiosity 4: Creating Cultures of Curiosity
The biggest factor in our students’ curiosity at school is us! Teachers can create (or kill) cultures of curiosity. We’ll look at four qualities and a couple experiments run by Susan Engel.
Curiosity 3: Curiosity Is Social
When we’re curious, we can enhance that curiosity by discussing it with others. Our mutual confusion takes us deeper into the experience.
Curiosity 2: Confusion and Curiosity
So how do we make kids curious? We’ll cover two aspects: creating information gaps and (yes) purposefully confusing our students.
Curiosity 1: Anticipation and Dopamine
In part one of this curiosity series, we explore the connection between curiosity, anticipation, and dopamine and discover why we remember things better when we are allowed to wonder.
Tickling Curiosity
Let’s look at a way to encourage and scaffold curiosity in our classes using a “Book of Unanswered Questions.” Begin by sharing intriguing objects or images and asking your own questions. Give kids a chance to find answers to their questions. Then encourage students to bring in their own intriguing conversation starters. Finally, move students towards curriculum based questions.
The Original Puzzlement: A Zoetrope
As teachers, I spend a ton of time searching for inspiration to enliven my lessons. But sometimes, inspiration hits as soon as you leave the desk and books behind. Friday my wife and I took a trip to Disneyland and saw this unbelievable (literally, it seems like magic) intersection of art & technology.
