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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.
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.
If you want to make a massive change in the culture of your classroom, move from teachers asking students all of the questions to students asking each other questions!
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?”
How I’d build a curiosity project around an experiment rather than just research.
As we wrap up our curiosity guide, I share three recipes to help you cook up curiosity in your classroom.
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.
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.
When we’re curious, we can enhance that curiosity by discussing it with others. Our mutual confusion takes us deeper into the experience.
So how do we make kids curious? We’ll cover two aspects: creating information gaps and (yes) purposefully confusing our students.
Perfect to wrap up the year: a four-round puzzlement tournament.
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.