All AboutA Curiosity Guide

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.

So how do we make kids curious? We’ll cover two aspects: creating information gaps and (yes) purposefully confusing our students.

When we’re curious, we can enhance that curiosity by discussing it with others. Our mutual confusion takes us deeper into the experience.

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.

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.

As we wrap up our curiosity guide, I share three recipes to help you cook up curiosity in your classroom.