In the closing weeks of winter trimester, my intervention class turns its attention to the future. Students are in the process of generating a list of inquiry topics or questions and ultimately they will vote on the one they want to pursue at the start of the spring term. In the fall, they voted on the topic of civil disobedience, and in winter, it was paranormal activity. This system is not a guarantee of their engagement and investment, but it certainly improves the likelihood of getting them involved. For this month’s newsletter, I’d like to devote a little time to this concept of engagement, and the ways that we might foster environments of curiosity and wonder to fuel the engine of learning.
Now I will admit that stirring up some level of energy and enthusiasm in today’s atmosphere is especially difficult. And while I know that taking steps like offering choice and differentiating instruction are important first steps, they are not silver bullet solutions. I will also acknowledge that we have both institutional and structural barriers to some of these practices. We are often confined by institutional barriers like a required curriculum that doesn’t always allow for flexibility, or structural barriers like limited amounts of time and large caseloads where it is difficult to manage lots of individual choices.
With that said, building a sense of engagement through cultivating curiosity and wonder can happen. There are so many choices we can make that offer students an opportunity to become involved and engaged. It is also evident that many of you are already doing this. It is exciting to see evidence of the world entering our classrooms, making them more relevant and alive.
In talking with recent AV grads Halima and Uzo who are both attending an elite university, I am fascinated by their class offerings. They are taking undergraduate courses in psychology, politics, engineering, and sociology, but almost all of them are tailored to relevant or timely topics: an introduction to psychology class built around sleep studies, a sociology class built around a study of Covid responses in different communities, and an engineering course related to “market engineering.” Looking at some of these course titles, it is hard not to get excited about the subjects they study, and it leads me to wonder what could be done in our own classes. (And in fact, as mentioned above, might already be happening.) Can you imagine a math unit built around the current exploration of Mars, a social studies unit built round protest, insurrection and civil disobedience, or an English unit built around inaugural poems!
Of course, we cannot just drop everything and redesign our classes around the latest Tik Tok trend, meme or viral news story. Though it would be fun, we cannot throw out required learning targets in order to chart our own course into the wilds. The model isn’t that we should re-shape entire classes, but rather to look for ways we can introduce timely or relevant topics and events into our pre-existing curriculum and lessons.
Here are some ways that we can do so:
Foster a Sense of Wonder. It has been really difficult to get people to respond or talk in our distance and hybrid models, so I realize that this will not be easy to do. However, building a sense of trust and a sense of community is important to determining the types of topics and units that might be of interest to them. And this takes time. It also takes a little bit of discipline. Sometimes our first response to a student’s interests or hobbies is a little judgmental. We are not as eager to hear that someone loves to play Call of Duty or is unusually obsessed with BTS. My first impulse is to sometimes cringe-- forgetting that I once cared deeply about matters that my elders often considered trivial or even a little problematic. Use those interests as a starting point into a conversation, one where perhaps they move on to other subjects or where you begin to identify elements of that interest or hobby that might intersect with your own, or better yet, speak to something relevant or important to the larger world.
What Do You Wonder. On occasion, I will actually use the “what is something that you wonder about” as a class opener. We will either do it as a whip around, or I give them a moment to think about it and then call on a few select students to share with the class. In some cases, I might create a “Wonder List” on the wall that serves as a constant reminder for me to pull these ideas into class or to explore on my own!
Avoid Answering Every Question. One of the hardest things to do is prevent yourself from answering deep questions for students. Sometimes, students can’t answer them because they simply don’t care. But other times, they don’t answer them because they simply don’t know. Leaving that question unanswered can actually build that sense of wonder and curiosity. It also promotes a sense of agency because it puts more of the responsibility for answering that question on the shoulders of students. Some teachers use “parking lots” as a tool for housing these questions. Like a “Wonder List,” a parking lot is just space (usually on a giant post it note or a corner of the white board) where teachers or students can record questions that they cannot answer at the moment. Teachers can regularly refresh or even clear their parking lots, or even spend a few moments revisiting the questions to see if anyone has come to a conclusion.
Find the full newsletter here.
