How Schools Smother Curiosity

This week's article summary is How Schools Smother Curiosity.

At our Admissions Open Houses, I share with prospective parents the 4 Cs we stress at Trinity:

• Cognition -- the fancy word for academic development
• Character -- ethical/moral and organization/executive function skills, habits, and attitudes
• Confidence -- which we build in students slowly over time 
• Curiosity – innate in young children, yet sadly can be extinguished as early as 2nd grade

As you’ll read in the article below, furthering curiosity in students is too often lacking in schools. With un-engaging, low level, rote assignments, school often becomes a mundane chore for kids to endure rather than an exciting adventure of exploration, discovery, and possibilities.

For Trinity, maintaining a child’s innate curiosity is one of our hallmarks.

We employ many teaching strategies to spark our students’ curiosity:

• Asking them to reflect on their learning
• Challenging them to find multiple solutions to a problem
• Working collaboratively and cooperatively in groups with other students
• Asking open-ended questions
• Giving students options and choices in class
• Soliciting feedback from students about what interests them
• Providing age-appropriate assignments and activities that are engaging and relevant to children

It’s important that we never take for granted how unique we are in developing a strong foundation of continued curiosity.  It’s why we proudly say that we create life-long learners.

Joe

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When Susan Engel, a psychologist at Williams College, decided to spend a few months observing suburban elementary schools, she had a specific goal in mind: to study variations in rates of children’s curiosity. Which kids asked lots of questions? Which classrooms tended to encourage that? But Engel discovered that it was almost impossible to make valid comparisons because “there was such an astonishingly low rate of curiosity in any of the classrooms we visited.”

What she kept encountering—during that project and since—were children who had learned not to bother wondering. If a classmate did volunteer a fascinated observation (“A bird flew right into my house!”) or a question (“Why would it do that?”), the teacher would offer a perfunctory response and then direct the child back to the planned lesson.

For more than half a century, researchers have studied our desire to explore just for the sake of exploring, our itch to make sense of the unexpected. The educator Seymour Sarason argued that education should be dedicated to stimulating the “intellectual curiosity, awe, and wonder that a child possesses when he or she begins schooling.” Or at least try to avoid killing it.

Curiosity is valuable in its own right—and not just for children. It’s a passport to a richer, more fulfilling life. But it also contributes to academic achievement.

Left to their own devices, children will seek answers to the questions that bubble up in them. But adults can help—less by providing answers than by reframing and building on those questions. They can call attention to connections between what different kids are asking. They can assist a community of learners in finding resources and thinking more deeply as they explore.

How, specifically, should teachers nurture curiosity?

• Not just by welcoming students’ questions when they diverge from the curriculum but by rethinking the curriculum itself to address the topics that intrigue students. That includes questions to which the teacher doesn’t know the answer—and, indeed, questions that don’t have a single right answer.
• By “priming the pump” when necessary: suggesting questions or offering information that piques students’ curiosity about things they haven’t yet considered.
• By being curious themselves. A study confirmed that “the teacher’s own behavior has a powerful effect on a child’s disposition to explore.”
• By being keen to learn how each student’s mind works. Outstanding teachers tend to do more listening than talking, in part because, the more intensely interested a teacher is in a kid’s thinking, the more interested the kid becomes in her own thinking.
• By providing students with what psychological theorists call “autonomy support"—encouraging a sense of self-determination—which has been shown to heighten both intrinsic motivation (a concept that’s similar to curiosity) and the quality of learning.

Alas, these recommendations for teachers often run smack into structural constraints: an inflexible schedule that doesn’t leave time for exploration; a principal who insists on quiet, orderly classrooms; a central office that imposes a standardized curriculum; a school board that cares more about test scores than about meaningful learning.

Other traditional practices have a similar effect. Among the most reliable extinguishers of the flame of curiosity are mandatory homework (making students work a second shift after school), grades (which signal that success matters more than learning), a preoccupation with rigor (which often elicits anxiety, smothering curiosity), and the use of additional rewards or punishments to enforce this regimen.

Much of the problem comes from construing learning as a list of facts to be memorized or discrete skills to be practiced. This premise tends to promote teacher-centered direct instruction, which is often scripted or otherwise tightly controlled.

A group of University of California, Berkeley researchers found that when young children were shown exactly how to do something, they subsequently engaged in less exploration on their own than those who had received no explicit direction.

What Susan Engel discovered to her dismay in the early grades—a diminished desire to find out—only gets worse as kids make their way through traditional schools. Often, we don’t notice—either because, as Engel warns, we assume it’s enough for a teacher to be a nice, caring person or because we’re falsely reassured by high-achieving (albeit joyless) students. As education professor Lillian Weber once put it, too many kids start out as exclamation points and question marks, but leave school as plain periods.

Sure, everyone says curiosity is a lovely thing. But are we willing to oppose the traditional practices and policies that fail to nurture and even actively discourage it?