When and How Should Teachers Pursue Student Interests?
This year is my fifth year teaching, and I’ve frequently wondered when and how I should pursue my students’ interests in class. At this point in my career, I’ve decided there are only two good answers to these questions:
1. Immediately!
2. However the students want to pursue them!
Teachers appreciate students who are interested in what they’re learning about. By extension, we should—in theory—appreciate our students’ organic academic interests. In practice, however, it seems students’ interests are nearly always passed over for a teacher’s own commitments or ideas. Even teachers who earnestly plan to explore students’ interests and incorporate them into their course often don’t make it a priority, leaving it by the wayside when time inevitably runs out.
For the last four years, I’ve been one of those teachers. I’ve regularly given students questionnaires on their interests and always figured we’d have time later in the year to address them as a class. It rarely happened that we did have time—and when we did, I was usually only able to address the students’ interests in a haphazard way, or in a manner that didn’t appeal to the student who’d originally voiced the interest.
I’ve concluded there’s only one good way to solve this problem:
- Address students’ interests in class as soon as they’re voiced, and
- Address them in whatever manner most appeals to the students.
I figured it only made sense to publish this article after I had a real classroom example to cite, and this week it happened.
A few days ago, I led the students through some discussion of what “U.S. history” or “American history” really is, what kind of narratives are typically taught in U.S. history classrooms, and what sorts of narratives we could learn from in our class this year. My expectation was that the students would bring up Columbus, Jamestown, or Plymouth Rock as typical starting points for U.S. history, and then I would guide the students toward agreeing to start our own studies with ancient indigenous Alaskans instead.
Well, the students did agree about Columbus and early English settlements starting the usual U.S. history narrative, but then they went back far further than I expected in where they wanted to start our class. One student suggested that “American history” could really begin all the way back when Pangea existed, with the very land itself that would become the Americas. Then several other students agreed, and it was brought up a few more times as we continued our discussion.
As an aside, let me just explain—I’m the kind of history-lover who only loves human history. I have little interest in the formation of the universe, the geologic time scale, or the dinosaurs, and I generally never plan to spend much time (if any) on such ideas in my history classes.
However, I realized that the students had a genuine interest here, and we needed to follow it right away if we were ever going to follow it at all. I showed the students a video of tectonic change to point out when Pangea existed and how the lands that would become the Americas were part of it. Then I let the students do research into various aspects of what Pangea was like 200 million years ago—the plants, the animals, and the general conditions of life. One student found a great video to share with everyone, and it seemed like most everyone had a lot of fun.

Some of my most important goals for my U.S. history class—and all the social studies classes I teach—are for my students to explore big ideas and think critically about common narratives and assumptions in our culture. As it turns out, my students were ready to look at an even bigger “big picture” of where American history begins than I had ever expected. The best way for me to further their education that morning was to fully support their ideas and interests.
Next week, I think I’ll make a transition from Pangea to the geological composition of Southeast Alaska, how our continent came to look the way it does, and how humans came to populate it. Of course, if the students have more interests they want to explore along the way, I won’t hesitate to oblige!
