Cultivating Curiosity
Curiosity is something that everyone’s born with but very few have the keenness to enhance. It is something that can be triggered by anything; anytime, anywhere.
Curiosity and interest hold a major part in one’s life from the beginning. It helps one discover and learn about themselves and the wide wonderful world around.
This quality of being curious more often remains till childhood and disintegrates into other interests as one grows up. Children are very active and full of enthusiasm and imagination, eager to learn, they have a zeal for everything.
An educator who is as curious can nourish the question & answer seeking nature of children, nurture their outlook towards things, and encourage them to be lifelong learners.
Teaching curious students can be a herculean task if one does not know how to deal with students’ extraordinary and extravagant questions.
To face that head and heart on, we can first understand how learning takes place and the different styles by which learners grasp things through the works of revered researchers.
Let us consider this experiential theory by David Kolb. This learning theory presents the design of a student’s learning experience in a cyclical form called Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle which considers the combined roles of our emotions and cognition.
The roles of watching, feeling, thinking and doing are viewed as integrated parts of the learning process. All four stages coordinate and support each other.
Kolb’s 1984 theory suggests that there are four main states of the learning cycle:
- Concrete experience — understanding through personal involvement with reliance on feelings e.g. a student visits a bird sanctuary for the first time.
- Reflective observation — understanding ideas through different points of view and forming opinions e.g. the student makes observations about different birds and talks about what s(he) observed and feels/felt with their friends
- Abstract conceptualization — making personal theories and systemic planning about the experience/ subject/ concept e.g. the student now believes that birds of smaller size are more friendly and make sweeter sounds
- Active experimentation — putting something into action, experimenting with changing situations, taking a practical approach towards observation e.g. the student starts to make a logbook of different birds where they record species size-wise with their behavior patterns and their sounds
This theory can lead to amazing educational methods because it encourages creativity, fosters reflective thinking, and prepares students for exceptional and noteworthy experiences that await them.
Children love unusual and non-identical methods which let them explore new things. Physical activities often have them involved than purely mental ones. For instance, a child would learn projectile motion better on a basketball court than a classroom.
Let us take another example of the Seminar Method where students work in groups to understand, discuss and solve for problems as they receive guidance from teachers.
There is a sub-practice in this method which is called Socratic Seminar. In this, a teacher introduces a topic and facilitates an open-ended conversations, debates and discussions.
This innovative teaching method provides motivation and stimulates active participation. It also permits adaptive instruction.
Another fun method called role-play is used to educate children. It encourages students to think creatively and enriches active learning by bringing inanimate objects & concepts to life. Interaction between different elements in any topic in different subjects is best brought out by this method.
We know that educating young kids is difficult and tricky sometimes because they ask questions for which educators, parents & seniors don’t have an answer. For example, a kid once asked why there are no negative letters if there are negative numbers?
To address and have such questions stirred up, educators have found a very innovative technique — if a question pops up in any of the kids head, they can write it on a piece of paper and pin it on a bulletin board instead of asking it in an ongoing class and the teacher can take it up and answer it when (s)he finds an answer. This technique helps teachers continue with their lessons while students get the liberty to say or know what they want to.
There are diverse ways via which students like learning because they look forward to new and exciting things everyday they enter a classroom. The connection once sparked goes on for the entire day and if they continually recieve a similar environment, they get assurance of a healthy & playful learning space where their questions get appreciation too.
Now, it is difficult to use experimental approaches in every class while keeping the pace of covering the curriculum steady. Teachers can plan to have any of these twice or thrice a week or apply them for revision or summary practice on the completion of sections of the syllabus.
Engineering learning experiences that ignite curiosity will put students in the front seat to be the drivers of their own paths in their educational journey.
As William Arthur Ward once quoted “Curiosity is the wick in the candle of learning.” Let’s keep it burning for those teaching and learning.”
