Curiosity is the linchpin to learning. As innovative educators, we aspire to a ubiquitous approach where inquisitiveness is harnessed, purposefully centered, and consciously embedded. Ideally seeing our learners holding onto their child-like wonder, rather than gradually sucking it out of them.
In aspiring to honour this gift of childhood, we ponder how we might use our learners’ innate quest to discover solutions to their why’s and how’s to propel their learning. We recognise the importance of providing learners opportunities to discover how their curiosity helps them to learn, how harnessing their curiosity transforms them into powerful learners. We want our learners to leave us more curious than when they arrived.
Ron Ritchhart’s work tells us that a classroom that is a ‘Culture of Thinking’ uses ‘opportunities’ rather than ‘activities’ to engage learners in more of the cognitive heavy lifting, showing value for innate curiosity, learner thinking and voice. Exploring Ritchhart’s eight cultural forces can highlight the small yet powerful shifts in pedagogy that position learners as active thinkers, questioners, and investigators. As educators shift their roles, the learners' roles shifts also; seemingly tiny changes create influential ripples for engagement and learning.
As one of the eight Cultural Forces Ritchhart describes, ‘Opportunities’ encourages educators to plan ‘opportunities for thinking’ rather than the traditional ‘activities to do’; sounds simple but it isn’t so. It requires educators to let go of traditional lesson planning and reimagine the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of lessons. With a greater focus on the Split Screen Approach and Powerful Provocations, learners are positioned to do more of the cognitive heavy lifting. They’re encouraged to do and think rather than copy and complete.
Planning opportunities requires educators to take a step back, reconsider their role in the learning process, and let a little chaos take over the order of a predictable outcome. With organization celebrated as a teaching pinnacle and time, such a precious commodity, this shift in the process also requires a shift in mindset. The aim no longer is for learners to regurgitate modeled ‘work’ but rather to actively engage in opportunities to change their thinking and learning.
Planning for and providing learning opportunities seems like harder work initially but soon becomes second nature. Lesson planning, preparation, and managing learner action are so ingrained in us as educators so we must be willing to self-reflect and call ourselves and each other out as part of the process, too. With this shift in thinking, folders of re-used sheets and curated, predictable lessons become redundant and unproductive. Intriguing objects, curly questions, provoking images, tension and disequilibrium are much more fruitful and harness our learners’ natural gift as children - Creative Curiosity.
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