105 Ways Educators Provoke Curiosity in their Classrooms

What can you get when you ask 330 educators about how they Provoke Curiosity in their Classrooms?  You can get 105 sets of ideas that you might want to use with YOUR students.  

As you read in my last posting, I am spending this week online enjoying the ISTE20 LIVE virtual conference. Yesterday, Barbara Bray and Kerry Gallagher and I presented our Experiencing Curiosity, Play, and Joy in Learning session. It was a BLAST but more importantly, our attendee educators shared a plethora of ideas for igniting curiosity in their students.

After introducing our discussion about Curiosity, I decided to ask our virtual room full of educators to share what they did to spark their students' curiosity.

Provoke Curiosity

Since we were online, I couldn't ask 330 individuals to raise their hands and tell us their strategies, so we used the Chat Room to get their input. The problem with using chat rooms for people to enter multiple sentence answers is that not everyone can type quickly. Some people can enter their complete answer while others are rushed. 

We asked them to enter their ideas in chat but NOT click the SEND button. I gave them 90 seconds to enter their ideas and then, as a group, we ALL clicked the SEND button at the same time. *

As you might guess, we were flooded with chat ideas. It was amazing.  These were important so I gave them another 60 seconds to review them.  

As you might guess, they didn't get a chance to review all of them so I have posted their ideas below.

How Do You Spark Curiosity In Your Students?

• QFT- Question Formulation Technique to get kids (and adults) to generate questions and narrow focus for inquiry
• Book talks
• 101qs.com, Problem-Based Learning, driving questions, asking questions when asked questions, putting a picture on a screen and having student create the question
• Using an interesting picture as a writing prompt
• Asking questions, providing labs/experiments/situations for students to observe and be curious about, using inquiry based learning, encourage students to play!
• Why questions ... mysteries to solve
• Flipping lessons- letting the students lead the way!
• Asking questions. Thought puzzles. Brain-teasers. Wait time!
• Design Thinking projects & using hidden pictures based on answers with conditional formatting in Sheets.
• Reading. Listening to podcasts. creative arts processing
• Maker Lab; Jamboard; asking students to notice; encouraging reading;
• Notice and wonder
• Providing puzzles, playing games, setting up a problem to solve, provide manipulatives, asking for multiple answers
• We celebrate "button poking" - that is, we cheer on students who try things without having any idea what might happen just because (poke buttons to see what they do) or to solve a problem.
• Creating Project-based learning based on interests- student choice!!
• Pose an intriguing question
• By being here at the ISTE conference to learn new interesting skills
• Showing images from new topics for students to notice and wonder about. In virtual I use Jamboard for this. :-)
• Hidden surprise in every lesson - did you find it? Wait until the end of class to write it on your ticket!
• Weekly ed tech newsletter
• Process Art
• Field trip experiences!
• Show how a programmed robot works, and then allow the students to reconstruct the code without seeing how it was done.
• Makerspaces, choice centers, sketchbooks prompts- answering them and drawing them and writing them for the rest of the school
• Giving time for educators a chance to ask and answer their own questions thru inquiry
• Read an excerpt from a chapter book and stop at the cliffhanger to get kids to check the book out from the library.
• Ask the question beginning "what if...?"
• Project Lead The Way
• Questions, photos, partial storytelling... leaving the rest of the story.
• Use the Challenge-based learning model to spark creative learner-led solutions
• HyperDocs with reflection questions posed in "why"
• Newsletters highlighting teachers who are using those strategies that other teachers might want to try. I also just ask "what is your biggest issues right now?" and work together to solve them
• When asked a question, say: "I don't know, how can we find out?"
• Disruptus
• Spark Curiosity by asking students --> What do you THINK you know? What do you WANT to know?
• Breakout boxes, mystery piles of books on the tables in the library
• The electoral college, 2 party system,
• More student agency!
• STEM, PBL, Talking circles, Genius Hours, Coding
• Research, Open ending questions,
• Using images and video clips to get students into inquiry mode before introducing a big topic.
• Look for discrepant event to engage surprise
• Using different apps like quizziz
• Asking questions, showing an image or video snippet, genius hour, giving 'playground time' when first trying a new tech tool
• Genius Hour
• Using mentor texts that get kids' attention.
• Share a story with a cliffhanger ending.
• Giving a teaser for "freebies" or templates at the end of teacher PD, but not saying what they are or what they look like.
• Have the kids ask a question about their community - what is something relevant to them? Then work collaboratively to create a solution.
• What do you notice, what do you wonder?
• Visible thinking routine, morning centres,
• Check-in questions
• Use the "What's happening in this Picture?" to generate questions....and then discuss all the questions....and then reveal the answer (got the idea from NY Times)
• The wall of why- lists of wonderings to tackle during why-finding Fridays
• Open-ended questioning with adults
• Question of the week on Flipgrid. I used to do 20 Time!
• I love to spark creativity with music and humor
• Deep questioning, hands-on displays, posters with interesting graphics, demonstrations
• Using Images and Objects. Students are required to pose questions about a visual presented, and their wonderings can often lead the conversation in variety of directions.
• I use visuals that make my students wonder about the upcoming unit.
• #AdobeCreativeEducator
• Starting with something engaging (a video clip, mystery science, trick, challenge, etc)
• Instead of asking pre-determined discussion questions, after reading a piece, I ask, "What's discussion-worthy here?" They always notice everything I wanted them to, plus more :)
• Ask questions about crazy animals facts, such as "Do cockatoos play catch?" Let them predict their answer, and then share a video.
• I do games to let them know what the class is going to be about, I play hangman or memory
• Hands-on projects and games
• Jamboard and Menti
• I'm inviting my students to design their own questions before starting their research
• I show the students that I'm the learner.
• Asking engaging questions, ice breakers, games, movement, STEM, student choice
• Personal connections and interests - Open exploration of online resources
• Pictures, videos,
• Inquiry, letting students take the lead, problem-based learning, multimedia, student creation
• Experimentation.
• Flipgrid
• Tying content to interests or something that matters to the individual
• Design challenges for teachers
• 3 Reads, Notice and wonder, stem activities, phenomena based instruction
• Stories: Tell a story through puppets, but leave the end for them to discover it in the reading.
• Ouch.... Curiosity in the classroom..... I worry that I am not curious enough this year!
• #BreakISTEchat
• I bring in random objects or images and teach students to ask questions. Tinker!!!
• Jamboard
• Makerspace challenges
• Inquiry process and questioning
• Read the first 2 chapters only of a book then place in our class library for children to finish
• I teach higher ed ELL where wonder and curiosity are often ignored/forgotten.

Click Here to access this list in a Google Doc.

* This is a strategy that I learned from Dr. Doug Shaw. He calls it "Enter Key is Lava" because it is untouchable.

Word Cloud Image: Dr. Gordon Dahlby

Do You Discuss with your Students to Check or Create Understanding?

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Are you discussing with your students to Check for Understanding or Create Understanding?

It seems to me that these are not mutually exclusive.  I would submit that you would want to begin with Creating Understanding and then integrate questions throughout the discussion to "check for understanding."

I could see that it would be of value to share this chart with my students at the beginning of the semester and to use it as a guide for discussion throughout the semester (and for the rest of our lives.)

What do you think?

After the Election . . .

Commons.wikimedia.org

I don't know how you have been handling your students' feelings after the election, but I discussed it in my class on Friday.   I began the discussion by saying 

I have been reading a number of things about teachers asking their students about how they feel after the election, and I just wanted to open up the discussion to you.  After 9/11, I didn't know what to do so I just taught my lessons and didn't even discuss the incident.  Students came to me saying that they felt cheated because they didn't have a chance to share and deal with their feelings.  I don't want to do that this time so do any of you have feelings that you want to share?  This isn't a discussion about politics.  It is about feelings.

Some of my students shared some deep feelings of fear and anxiety.  Some of those who didn't feel threatened still felt anxiety. Some students felt that some of the reactions we heard about on the news (i.e., closing down a college so that students could deal with the results of the election) were not the reactions of adults and that we just had to deal with it.  

It was a good discussion and we talked until they had nothing else to say.  I shared that I was available if anyone wanted to talk. I think that it was a positive experience.

I was prompted to write this email after reading a posting on Jennifer Gonzalez's blog, The Cult of Pedagogy. She decided that the best thing to post a "To Do List" of things that teachers can do in a situation like this.

I recommend reading, After the Election: A To-Do List, and maybe sharing it with your students.  BTW, this is a wonderful blog filled with posts, podcasts, videos, and teaching materials that you may find useful in your everyday teaching - I know that I have.

What are your experiences?  

What suggestions do you have about dealing with these emotions?

Share them in the Comments section below.

8 Biggest Challenges that Teachers Face Today

The folks over at Emerging Ed Tech recently did a survey of their readers to find out what they wanted to know about education and Instructional technology. They had 160 replies which is a good response.  

This table is a list of their results.  Some of the issues are standard issues, but it looks like they are feeling the challenges of integrating 21st Century Learning strategies in their classrooms.  Admittedly, this is not a cross-section of all teachers, because there is a specific group of teachers who read their website.  These teachers are forward looking.  They are the ones who are trying to improve their leaching/learning environments. They are the ones who go to conferences and are continually reading and watching and connecting. 

I look at the list and and all of them are concerns of mine.   How does this fit what challenges you in your teaching?

Is Teacher Education Addressing the Needs of Future Teachers?

How do we effect change in our schools if our Teacher Education programs just keep doing more of the same? We talk about changing the learning environments of our schools, but where is the paradigm changing in our Teacher Education institutions?  A new set of standards (INTASC) are being released to guide teacher education programs, but will it make difference?

Teachers tend to teach the way they were taught. Learning experiences will have a greater effect on a teacher's teaching style than all the textbooks in the world. We can't fully appreciate a different learning experience unless we personally experience that experience. New teachers won't teach differently in their classrooms unless they have learned in a different manner and found it to be a positive experience. In short, we won't see change in our schools until we change how we prepare new teachers.

Last week I attended the School Administrators of Iowa (SAI) conference in Des Moines as a representative of our Iowa Technology and Education Connection (ITEC) organization.  I spoke with scores of administrators who told me that they are in the process of exploring and/or implementing a  1-to-1 computer learning environment. When I asked them how they were going to change their curriculum and pedagogical strategies so that the technology-enriched environment would actually make a change in how their students learned, most of them chuckled and said "We're still trying to figure that out."

Technology doesn't make the difference.  It provides the opportunities for education to be different. It is truly the teaching/learning strategies that make the difference.  But if we haven't defined the teachers' knowledge, skills and attitudes that are needed to successfully support a different technology-enriched learning environment, how can we provide a preservice teaching program to address these needs?

A Teacher Education program needs to identify what skills and tools need to be mastered to effectively work in a 1-to-1 learning environment and then they need to teach/use those methods in the classes they teach.  It's as simple as that.

I made a drastic change in the way I taught my Emerging Instructional Technology course this summer.  I have spoken on it at ISTE '10, but haven't blogged on it yet. It changed the way I plan to teach all of my courses and such an insight into how learning can be different is something that all teacher education professors should acquire.

This posting is part of the ongoing self-inquiry I am going through to become a better teacher. You might remember my first posting, How Do I Move to an Inquiry-Based Form of Teaching/Learning?

What are your ideas about this?  Do you know a source for finding/identifying the necessary knowledge/skills/attitudes/tools for optimizing a technology-rich learning environment?

What do you think?

Z

photo:http://illinoiseducationassociation.org/