You have a duty to be curious (part one)

Curiosity is a habit we should all develop

First published April 2012.

I had an interesting chat with Marie Huxtable yesterday morning. Marie is a senior educational psychologist and involved in Living Theory action research, alongside Jack Whitehead.

To quote Jack’s site, “In a living educational theory approach to action research, individuals hold their lives to account by producing explanations of their educational influences in their own learning in enquiries of the kind, ‘How am I improving what I am doing?’ They do this in contexts where they are seeking to live the values they use to give life meaning and purpose as fully as they can.”

There are lots of things that are particularly striking about this whole approach but our wide-ranging discussion caused me to focus on the importance of having a space in which to be reflective and articulate our learning and understanding to improve our practice. Where Marie’s interest is the classroom, I was thinking about implications in my field of youth work and young people’s social care.

I am a naturally curious person. I like to learn, to explore ideas and see how they chime with my views, philosophies and values. Whenever I’m learning about something new in whatever field, I’m thinking about how I can use this new knowledge or way of thinking in my work. Inevitably, and this has always been the case, I am a reflective practitioner.

I think because this has been my habit, I’ve always assumed that it is true of most people that I come across through my work, especially those involved in supporting the learning and development of others. It’s very human work, why wouldn’t you be curious enough to interrogate it and ask what else you can contribute to it? But I have learned over the years that I’m often wrong. Very many of us in these influential roles, fail to develop our own broader learning or a sense of ourselves in the wider world, not just in the context of our everyday concerns. Not only that, we assume this pose while exhorting those we teach or support to be good learners and citizens: curious, interested and engaged.

My line to social workers, foster carers and others involved in supporting young people as they prepare to leave care has been, “you have a duty to be curious”. I phrased it this way simply because these hardworking people are overloaded with statutory duties relating to their charges, so this seemed like a nice one to add.

What I was urging was for those closest to young people to model curiosity, to take an interest in learning, to show that learning was not something that always took place in a classroom, that finding out new things could teach you about yourself and your place in the world.

So if it’s not a personal habit, how do we ensure that professionals working with young people have the opportunity to learn, explore and reflect as part of their roles? Usually, particularly in social care, these opportunities will be delivered through supervision and training days. Supervision will almost certainly be filled with addressing difficult casework rather than personal development or reflection.

Training days are interesting. My experience is that participants often expect to be told something new, rather than to experience an opportunity to reflect on their practice, in a less directive way. This tells us a lot about adults thinking about training as they experienced school — someone stands at the front and tells you something, you learn it. However, if a session goes well, evaluation forms will say, “it was good to get the chance to reflect on my work”, even if that wasn’t what they were expecting at the outset.

So perhaps we need to create those curious and reflective habits more explicitly at work? We should be clear that reflection and exploration of practice, asking questions about what we do and how we do it, is still critical to our doing it well and that spending time doing these things will improve our practice.

This is a big issue and I’ve been thinking about it a lot in different ways over the last few years. Now that I’m freelance, I want to write about it in more depth. So these are first thoughts, I want to take the time to unpick them.