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Running A Curiosity Project

If you’ve read my series on curiosity in schools, you’ll know that my classroom had a serious problem: students rarely demonstrated curiosity. This was my fault as an educator, not there’s as students (I mean, the same kids went home and were highly curious).

I spent several years refining a weekly “Curiosity Time” in order to tackle this tricky problem. Here’s the (big) summary!

Note: it’s key to focus on curiosity and interest, not “passions.” I wrote more on why I learned to settle down with the word “passion”.

Exposure

In observations, I noticed that great teachers constantly expose students to interesting ideas beyond the scope of their curriculum. They sneak in art or clips from classic films or ideas from their own college courses.

That’s why I started my weekly Puzzlement mailers. It’s a way to quickly stir up curiosity in students, just as an amuse-bouche is designed to stir up one’s appetite. Some students will latch onto an idea and explore it on their own. Some will not. That’s fine.

But, is there a way to establish more explicit instruction to guide students in pursuing curiosity?

Scaffold and Model

As always, we must scaffold and model anything that we teach. Curiosity is no different. When I reflect on my lessons-gone-wrong, the mistake is almost always that I skipped modeling, built insufficient scaffolds, and rushed to get students working on their own. The results were often, uh, mixed. But it’s no surprise, right? I didn’t actually teach them the project!

Modeling is a required step in any model of instruction. That means, if my class is doing a research project, I must first do each step of your own research project in front of them. Skipping the modeling step is like cooking your chicken to only 130º so that you can “save time.” It’s pennywise and pound-foolish.

So, the first time we’d go through our weekly curiosity time, I’d give all students the same topic. This way we can practice the process together. This is a scaffold. One year, we all investigated chess during the first round. Then, in the next round, they’d pick from a set of choices I gave them before eventually graduate into a truly independent study later in the year.

Simplifying the “pick a topic” stage at first is a scaffold. It allows students to spend their brain’s energy (and our time) on other parts of the project. Later, we remove scaffolds.

Refine The Topic

Now, since chess is an enormous topic that some people devote their entire lives to, we’ll need to refine the topic of “chess.”

Wikipedia offers a great way to see refined, sub-categories within a larger topic. If you scroll down to the very bottom of the “Chess” page, you’ll see a table labeled “Chess” with links to more specific topics within chess.

Chess categories from Wikipedia

You’ll find:

And then even more specific topics, like:

These smaller, sub-topics are much more manageable. So, even though we’re all using chess as our topic, students can pick a sub-topic. And note that I’ve given them the sub-topics to choose from. We’re not going to spin our wheels thinking of topics. I want them to spend their brain energy on learning how to research, not picking their topic.

Develop Questions

Next, students develop questions to guide their exploration. They’ll create sophisticated questions by combining a question word (who, what, where, when, why, how) with one of the icons of depth and complexity or content imperatives to form specific questions.

Also consider bringing in these key words (a subset of words developed by Sandra Kaplan): significance, function, types, conditions, consequences, purpose, traits, reaction, evidence, and influence.

Example Questions

The Differentiator will help create interesting objectives.

Above all, these questions should be intriguing to students. They should want to find out more. Curiosity must be fueled by interest or it simply isn’t curiosity!

It’s fascinating to ask kids, “Are you actually interested in that question?” And see them slowly shake their heads, “no.” Well, let’s develop questions that are actually interesting then! My 12 year olds would seem surprised by the idea of pursuing somethi

Now students can actually go about finding information to their curious questions. (Now, this is all about information-based research. What if students’ curiosity bends towards more experimental questions? I wrote more about that here.)

Presentations

I always wrapped up with a week of presentations. Over at Byrdseed.TV, I have a series of videos to help students develop actually fun-to-watch presentations. In short:

Final Tips To Running A Curiosity Project

Watch the video lesson →