Setting Students Up to Grapple With Ideas to Promote Curiosity

I’ve found that there are various misconceptions around curiosity in the classroom that can prevent teachers from intentionally designing for it. Many think that it depends on students’ interests in a specific topic, or it is something that just naturally happens for some students and not others. There’s a notion that it requires an intense amount of planning, entertainment, and showmanship; it’s only for younger students; or, in order to inspire curiosity, academic learning and rigor are lost.

However, I believe that curiosity is less about the topic and more about how students experience learning, and educators can design for curiosity regardless of the topic they’re teaching. When students have opportunities to wonder, grapple with ideas, construct understanding, and continue asking questions, their curiosity is piqued, engagement increases, and learning deepens.

Prompt Students to Wonder

You can motivate students to grapple with complex ideas and work through challenging problems—provide a reason for them to want to know more. When I create a moment that sparks questions and helps students see that there’s something worth putting in the effort to figure out, they’re more deeply engaged. Sometimes, simply asking students, “What do you wonder?” and giving them time to develop and share questions is the perfect way to start.

Additionally, you might consider these other curiosity-inspiring strategies:

• Display a compelling photograph, historical artifact, graph, political cartoon, map, or painting that’s connected to the upcoming lesson, unit, or topic. Then ask students to brainstorm questions about it.
• Share a surprising statistic or misconception and questions and thoughts before sharing the explanation/fact.
• Introduce a current event or authentic problem that connects classroom learning to the world outside of the classroom.
• Demonstrate or show a video of a scientific phenomenon, complex mathematical pattern, historical event, art piece, etc. Before explaining how and why it happened or why it was created, have students develop their own ideas.
• Ask questions that encourage students to connect personally with the topic, such as ”Have you ever believed something that turned out to be untrue? What makes people change their mind? When faced with a question, how do you find the answer?”
• Begin a novel by examining a symbol, reading a provocative excerpt, or reframing a fictional problem in a realistic way that connects to their lives.
• Read a brief excerpt from a memoir, article, or book that leaves students wondering, and ask them to predict what happens next.
• Show primary sources with conflicting information, and ask students to determine what each reveals and what questions they still have.

These experiences don’t require intense planning or much time. A carefully chosen image, two-minute discussion, or quick write is often enough to shift students from passive learners to active learners who are searching for answers.

Encourage Them to Embrace Friction

Once students begin to wonder, our instinct as teachers is often to answer their questions and reduce the “friction.” However, it’s important to resist immediately answering their questions. Instead, provide time and space for them to grapple with how to answer a question or solve a problem. When you immediately explain or remove every obstacle, students learn to depend on you for understanding instead of developing confidence in their own ability to investigate, discuss, and reason. Giving students space to grapple isn’t about leaving them confused or unsupported. Students need scaffolds, collaboration, and teacher guidance, but they also need to think, work, and wait for their teachers to give the answers.

Build opportunities for students to grapple by asking them to do the following:

• Generate hypotheses and predictions
• Debate multiple possible explanations before revealing an accepted answer
• Compare competing perspectives from various sources
• Investigate evidence before receiving direct instruction
• Defend their thinking using evidence
• Solve problems using multiple solution methods and determine which one is the most efficient
• Revise their thinking after learning new information
• Defend a character or historical figure’s decisions using textual evidence

The key is to create experiences where students are able to see that the process of figuring something out themselves is valuable work.

Guide Students to Pursue Discovery

This isn’t about you leaving students to figure out their learning on their own. This is the moment when they connect ideas, test thinking, make sense of their learning, and hopefully experience the satisfaction of realizing that they understand a new concept. After they’ve wondered about and grappled with an idea, they need instruction to help them organize their thoughts and deepen their current understanding so they can connect new ideas to what they know. This discovery is an active learning process; students remember information, develop their overall schema, and build confidence in their own ability to learn and solve problems. This is hopefully the time when they say, “Now I understand.”

Teachers can facilitate this stage of learning through a variety of tools and activities. For example, you might hold collaborative discussions so students can share and refine their own ideas. Graphic organizers are also useful for this because they help students to see relationships within new information and organize their ideas. Additionally, suggest interdisciplinary connections to show students how the topics connect across their classes.

I introduce visible thinking routines when I want students to share their internal monologue or make their thinking apparent to others. Metacognitively focused sentence starters such as “I used to think…,” “Now I think…,” “My thinking changed because…” are helpful for this. Two other effective ways for students to discover and cement their learning are to have them apply new understandings to authentic situations and to teach their peers content they’ve learned.

Reflection is also an important aspect of this process. Students can revisit their original thinking and consider the evidence that refined their understanding. When they see their own growth and learning clearly, students are better prepared to tackle complex challenges in the future.

Wonder Again

I sustain student curiosity by asking more questions. Before leaving a topic, extend students’ thinking by asking these questions:

• What surprised you?
• What do you still wonder?
• How does what you learned connect to something you already knew?
• What would you like to find out next?

When teachers intentionally design for curiosity, they help students see themselves as lifelong learners. Our goal is greater than motivating students to pay attention, complete an assignment, or earn a grade. We are helping them discover that they’re capable of finding meaningful answers to inspiring questions.