Nourish the Curiousity

This week I invited an educator who retired from the Missouri Public Schools system (who also happens to be my lovely grandmother) to share her thoughts on teaching. 

As a teacher of over twenty years’ experience (and now retired for ten years), I have seen many changes in classroom teaching, only some of which have been helpful.  Many have not. As more and more attempts at micro-managing the classroom have been implemented over the years, education seems to have suffered rather than prospered as rigid curriculums have become the increasing focus of administrators and vocal parents alike to the point that all teachers should be teaching exactly the same lessons on the same day with total focus on content.  All goals and objectives should be listed in lengthy, detailed lesson plans and not to be deviated from when once written down. The unfortunate victims of this paranoid attempt at making one education fit all has often seen the demise of two of the most necessary components in the learning process of every child:  creativity and a spontaneous enthusiasm for learning.

Humans have an uncanny need to be curious from birth.  Exploring the world about us leads infants to discover everything from how to manipulate their fingers and feet to learning, sometimes, multiple languages when given the opportunity. Show a child a simple flower and the immediate response is to reach out for it in order to examine it:  smell it, touch it, find out how it’s constructed, how durable it is, and even taste it. Humans have, upon birth, an insatiable desire to learn everything … until it is beaten out of them by unimaginative, dry lessons from a book or a computer. Spontaneity is gone. The choice of the child’s pathway to learning is replaced by extensively written lesson plans that align with someone else’s idea of what should be learned. The child quickly becomes bored and turned off to learning any of it.  Teacher lectures on diligence and self-discipline may improve a child’s grades, but the love of learning is irreparably damaged.  At the heart of a fully functional classroom should be the necessary spontaneity to pursue whatever relevant subject has captured the students’ imagination and then build on that. Teachers should also be allowed to be creative in their approach to the subject, finding unusual   tie-ins to spark student interest and getting them excited about the teacher’s hidden goals in the lesson. What may work in this case might not be as difficult as it at first appears.  Teachers might begin a class by showing an unusual object (for example a teapot that embodies British colonialism in India and Africa during the eighteenth century) or showing a picture of an unusual work of art that exhibits the characteristics of a given era and asking students to pick it apart to find out what the artist was trying to say.  Can anyone say “developing critical thinking skills” here? Students love a mystery. Who was involved? What happened? Why did it happen? Once they are engaged, students will often take the proverbial horse’s bit and, given a trail to follow, they will take it from there. Just to announce “Read pp. 101-107” in your textbooks or go to this particular website does not excite most of us and students are no different.  Allow teachers to be creative in their approach to the subject, and if something stirs up excitement, follow it!  Having a handy list of half a dozen related resources for further investigation by students is also a good idea here.

Given that all teachers may not share an equal amount of creativity (having had it drained out of them many years ago) another great idea is for teachers to share ideas among themselves. Doughnuts, hot chocolate, coffee and snacks provided by helpful school boards and parents are fantastic incentives for coming to these sharing meetings and they help to create a warm, congenial, informal atmosphere rather than a “Wow! Another pointless meeting to attend. I could be grading papers.”  The beginning of the cycle is always to stir up the curiosity and enthusiasm within the teachers themselves. Everybody brings an idea that worked or didn’t work to the meeting.  Why was it good? What were the results? Why didn’t it work? Where did it fail?  An idea I’d like to try, but I haven’t yet.  Teachers will always be interested in improving their performance in the classroom and they take a secret delight in seeing students who are stirred up about a subject and wanting to know more. It gives teachers a feeling of success. They seem to like that.  Criticism is often the teacher’s life, not praise.

In the end, the focus of education should be to create lifelong learners, critical thinkers, and never ever to kill that innate sense of curiosity that was given to each of us at birth.  Bring back the excitement and nourish the curiosity. The rest will follow.

By: Rebecca McDonald