One thing for certain, if you think you’ve stepped down a gear on the personal learning side lately, maybe you need to thinking about being more intentionally curious rather than just letting new ideas, new strategies, and dare I say it, new technologies slip by. But if we do generally applaud curiosity, why don’t we celebrate a curious mind more openly? Certainly our current political agenda would benefit ‘bigly’ from it. Its funny, but I think being curious is looked upon by most people as a positive attribute, so I’m guessing you probably took a liberal view in answering those questions.
How curious are you? How do you know? What would justify your response? Are you simply someone who asks a lot of questions of others or do you prefer to take most things at face value? Would you say you had an ‘enquiring mind’, and again what evidence do you have in saying that? So let’s be a bit self-reflective for a moment.
Sure, its obvious that in the traditional teaching dominated classrooms, learning comes second, and with that, the focus is too often on what to teach, rather than on curious minds asking questions that might more intentionally drive a student’s learning. If we assume our young people arrive on the planet curious about the world around them, asking questions about anything and everything, what happens to them? Do they just ‘lose’ their natural curiosity and ‘grow out of it’, or is it that we really do manage to teach the curiosity out of them? If curiosity is really the essential food of learning, then the obvious question is, why don’t we focus more on developing searchingly curious minds as a priority in our students? While we’re tripping the 21stCentury learning light fantastic, maybe we should have been more curious about the role of curiosity as a building block of learning. Surely you must learn to be curious because you need to be curious to learn. So when I hear someone say that it’s a pity their kids aren’t more curious, I wonder what their motivation in saying that is. It’s not something we have talked enough about in the past, but in a society that celebrates creativity and innovative thinking, I feel it will be a lot more prominent in the future.
0 kommentar(er)
