Cultivating Curiosity in Your Classroom

with Wendy Ostroff

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Summary

Curiosity comes from within—we just have to know how to unleash it.

Humans are natural learners. We learn throughout our lives by engaging, exploring, asking questions, and testing out answers. Yet classrooms are not always places where such curiosity is encouraged and supported.

But it is relatively easy to transform any classroom into a hotbed of curiosity and wonder. In this webinar, Wendy Ostroff, author of the ASCD book, Cultivating Curiosity in K–12 Classrooms: How to Promote and Sustain Deep Learning, will describe how you can create a structured, student-centered environment that allows for openness and surprise, where inquiry guides authentic learning. When a classroom is grounded in curiosity, teachers have the unique opportunity to mine students' deepest held wonder, making their engagement natural and effortless and allowing them to fully open up to learning.

This webinar will detail ways to foster student curiosity through novelty and play; questioning and critical thinking; and experimenting and problem solving. By providing techniques to try, scaffolding advice, and relevant research from neuroscience and psychology, Ostroff will help you harness the powerful drive in all learners—the drive to know, understand, and experience the world in a meaningful way.

Recorded July 28, 2016

Community of Excellence: Teaching and Learning

About the Presenter

WENDY OSTROFF, PhD, is a developmental and cognitive psychologist and a professor at the Hutchins School of Liberal Studies at Sonoma State University, a seminar-based program that prepares prospective teachers and emphasizes critical reading, writing, and thinking.

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