This ASCD Study Guide is designed to enhance your understanding of Developing More Curious Minds, an ASCD book published in February 2003, by helping you make connections between the text and the school or school district in which you work. This study guide can be used after you have read the entire book or as you finish each chapter. Readers may wish to start with the School and Personal Inventory, which appears in Appendix C. The inventory can provide helpful observations about life in your classrooms as you reflect on the lessons and strategies of John Barell's book.

Developing More Curious Minds is about inquisitiveness—the important role it plays in meaningful learning and how to foster it in classrooms, at home, and in informal learning settings like museums and field trips. This is a book for educators interested in creating communities of inquiry within their schools.

One of the major strategies in the book is modeling—sharing with others our curiosities about ourselves, our subject, and our world. Therefore, the guide reflects the author's desire to challenge readers not only to answer questions but also to raise questions of their own. Barell would be pleased to receive by e-mail the stories of educators starting what he calls an "intelligent revolution" in schools (see contact information at the end of this guide).

Chapter 1: A Culture of Inquisitiveness

1. Consider the following situations:
   • The explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger
   • NATO's accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade
   • The death of 13 students at the Texas A&M bonfire celebration
   • The flameout of ENRON and WorldCom
   • The quality of the investigation by the FBI of men who took flying lessons prior to 9/11
   
   What do these events and others you can identify tell you about the quality of inquisitiveness in our culture today?
   Where do you see other reflections of the same levels of inquisitiveness—in school, at home, and in the nation in general?
2. Why do you think some of us avoid being inquisitive? Do you agree with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s assessment about people being led around "like cattle?" Why or why not?
3. Do you agree with Lewis Lapham that schools "serve the interests of a society content to define education as a means of indoctrination and a way of teaching people to know their place?" Explain your reasoning.
4. Why do you think it is important to develop more curious minds?
5. What questions do you have about the need for a culture of inquisitiveness in our country?

Chapter 2: Models of Inquiry

1. Which of the teacher or student models of inquisitiveness do you admire? Why?
2. What common elements do you find in each of their stories? Which of these elements would you like to incorporate into your own teaching? How would you go about causing these changes?
3. If you could converse with any one of these persons, what would you ask her or him? (Consider corresponding with some of the educators mentioned in the text and listed in Appendix B.)
4. Consider Figure 2.1. Where do the skills and dispositions of inquiry fit in your model of curriculum? Create your own model of curricular knowledge, skills, and dispositions.

Chapter 3: Creating Schools of Inquiry

1. Use the School Inquisitiveness Inventory (Appendix C) to assess the quality of inquisitiveness in your setting. Select the four most important indicators of school inquisitiveness. What is your assessment? How do you explain the current situation? How might you work together toward a more desired condition?
2. What elements of your school culture would you like to work on and why?
   • Setting high expectations
   • Teacher modeling
   • Sharing our stories
   • Developing positive scripts
   • Asking questions and getting responses
   • Creating assignments and assessments
   • Improving the quality of peer interaction
3. What would happen if students in your class wrote letters to next year's incoming students? What do you think they would say?
4. Carl Sagan said, "Both skepticism and wonder are skills that need honing and practice. Their harmonious marriage within the mind of every schoolchild ought to be a principal goal of public education." ("The Marriage of Skepticism and Wonder," in Carl Sagan's The Demon-Hunted World. 1996. New York: Ballantine Books, p. 306.) Do you agree or disagree? Why? How might you incorporate these goals, or modifications thereof, into your school culture or the curricular framework resulting from Question 1?
5. What concerns or questions do you have about your school culture?

Chapter 4: The Nature of Good Questions

1. Tell the story of Izzy to a class or group and then conduct an inventory to determine what students think are good questions. Ask, "Why is it important to ask good questions?" Compare your responses with those in this chapter.
2. What are the big ideas in your subject about which students could be asking important questions? What questions do professionals in your subject ask and how do you invite students to pose them?
3. What roles do metacognitive, "What if?" and "How do you know?" questions play in your classroom?
4. What do your students want to know about asking good questions? What are your questions now?
5. Samuel Johnson said, "Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind" (The Rambler, 1751). Based on your reading of this chapter, how would you characterize a "vigorous mind?"

Chapter 5: Writing Our Curiosities

1. Critique Annie Dillard's quotation at the beginning of the chapter. In your experience, what can be the results of using such a "miner's pick?" What kinds of discoveries do you make?
2. Experiment during a professional development session with your own journal writing using the stems in this chapter. What "new territories" do you find?
3. What is your assessment of the journal entries of Emily, Sarah, and Rich? Of the ways Vin Frick and Dorothy Lozauskas used journals in their classes?
4. How might you incorporate journal and field notes writings in your class? If you do, how well do the writings elicit students' curiosities?
5. Review the problem-solving model outlined in this chapter (page 89). How would you modify it for your own purposes? What kind of model would students develop on their own?
6. What questions would you ask Captain Robert Falcon Scott based on reading the excerpts from his polar expedition journals of 1912?

Chapter 6: Questioning Texts

1. Select a text that is important in learning your subject and think about these questions:
   • How would you model your own inquisitiveness about the facts, concepts, and ideas revealed in the text?
   • What kinds of questions would you ask about this text?
   • How would you invite students' questions?
   • What would you then do with these questions?
2. How would you modify and use the Questioning Frame in Figures 6.1 and 6.2? If you challenged students to develop their own model, what kinds of generic questions would they generate within this graphic organizer?
3. If you were a student in your class rather than a teacher, what kinds of questions would you be posing about the texts they are reading now?
4. What curiosities about your subject have you been pondering and sharing with students?
5. Don Tapscott says, "The evidence is strong that N-Gen culture contains a strong ethos of curiosity, investigation, and the empowerment to change things" (Tapscott, D. (1998). Growing up digital: The rise of the net generation. New York: McGraw Hill, pp. 72-73.). Based on your reading of this chapter, what is your critique of this claim?

Chapter 7: An Intelligent Revolution

1. Identify statements made by political leaders, advertising campaigns, educators, and friends. (For example, "They are attacking us for who we are." "All humans are 99.9 percent alike." "The Internet can revolutionize educational practices.") What questions do you want to raise about these claims? What could you do with these questions?
2. Experiment with students' generating their own critical thinking questions about events, their experiences, and the claims or assertions of others. How are they different from the SEADS model?
3. How might you engage students in questioning the status quo with which they live in schools? What patterns, rationales, and alternatives can they generate and act upon?
4. What are the critical thinking questions that you find most significant in teaching your subject or in conducting your personal and interpersonal affairs?
5. What do you think is the role of inquisitiveness today in a democracy? How do we balance the need to know with national security interests? What kinds of questions ought we to be asking about the United States' "war on terrorism?"
6. One observer describes the media’s coverage of corporate practices over the past several years as "incurious cheerleaders, championing executives and innovative companies without questioning their books" (Ledbetter, J. (2003, January 2). The boys in the bubble. The New York Times, p. A17.). Based on your reading of this chapter, do you agree? Why?
7. How might you and your class engage in critical questioning of practices in your school?

Chapter 8: Inquiry- and Problem-Based Learning

1. What is your assessment of Anne White's and Cheryl Hopper's units on rocks and Africa, respectively? What might you have done differently? Why? What questions would you ask them? (See Appendix B.)
2. Critique the KWHLAQ model. How would you modify it and why? How could you use it in a future unit?
3. To what extent do you think it is important for students to pose their own content questions during a unit of instruction? How have you challenged them to do so in the past? How might you challenge them in the future? What resources might you need to carry through with this kind of model?
4. What concerns do you and your colleagues have with sharing more control of instructional decision making with your students? How might you deal with these concerns? When is it appropriate (and when is it not) to encourage students to take more control of their own learning?
5. Conduct an experiment with your class to determine the kinds of decisions you and they agree that students might have more control over. Carry out your plan and periodically reflect on your progress.

Chapter 9: Wisely Using the World Wide Web

1. Set up a learning experience with your students where they visit and analyze several educationally appropriate Web sites. Give them an opportunity to work individually and cooperatively to generate a set of questions they need to ask of any Web site to determine its value for educational purposes (consider using http://www.OLogy.amnh.org). You might start with the entire class analyzing one site and then provide students with opportunities to examine several others and then share their concerns. Develop a class model similar to SEADS that provide them with guidelines for future use.
2. To what extent do the issues mentioned in the text concern you: the point, click, and print approach, plagiarism, lack of other points of view, problem solving? What actions can you and your colleagues undertake to deal with these problems?
3. Consider the Web sites listed in Appendix A. Which ones can you use to foster the goals of the curriculum? What are your favorite Web sites and why?
4. What facilitates or impedes using the resources of the Internet in your classroom? How are you dealing with these problems?
5. Design your own Web site to meet your criteria.

Chapter 10: Of Museums and Field Notes

1. Plan with your students an expedition to an informal learning setting—a museum, park, recreational facility, or other setting.
2. What do the students want to find out? What resources do they need? How can students play the role of tour guides as Cheryl Hopper's students did?
3. While at the setting what might they investigate? What resources will they require? How will they generate new questions? Museums have been considered "free-choice" settings. Can students learn in these kinds of settings compared to schools? Why?
4. Back at school ask students what they found most interesting and what do they want to know more about? How would you structure their inquiries?
5. What problems or issues have you identified in contemplating the use of alternative, more informal learning settings like museums? How can you deal with these concerns?
6. How can students learn from museum Web sites like the American Museum of Natural History (http://www.amnh.org)?

Chapter 11: How We Assess Our Inquisitiveness

1. If inquiry is important to you and your students, consider challenging them to take the Personal Inquisitiveness Inventory (See Appendix C). Challenge them to analyze the results and suggest appropriate actions.
2. Ask students to define inquisitiveness. Ask them what it looks, sounds, and feels like as teachers in the text have done.
3. Challenge students to suggest indicators that reflect them becoming better at asking good questions. Compare their observations with those of students and teachers in this chapter.
4. What kinds of scoring rubrics could you set up to observe students' growth in inquisitiveness?
5. Create your own scoring rubrics that include an assessment of inquisitiveness for a class learning experience.

Chapter 12: The Power of Leadership

1. Share with your colleagues examples of good leadership in schools, in politics, and in your family. What characteristics do these leaders have in common? This is a good critical inquiry experience if we identify a good leader, share with a colleague our decision, then spend some time probing each other for the reasons for our choices. Do we, for example, consider evidence that contradicts our point of view? Have we considered all points of view? At the end we can reflect: What have we learned about our thought processes?
2. What could you do with a model of good leadership within your class or school? How can you benefit from the characteristics identified in Question 1?
3. How could you modify and use the professional development strategies identified within this chapter? Consider Deanne's, Jane's, Tim's, and Margaret's learning experiences.
4. In your judgment what have been the most successful professional development experiences of your career? What elements made these experiences so successful? Which elements could you use today within your school? What role do you think inquiry plays within good professional development for educators?
5. Make a plan for professional development experiences that reflect some of the elements you find in this chapter.

Final Notes

I hope you have been challenged by reading and working with Developing More Curious Minds. Please let me know what your responses have been to reading this book and working with some of the strategies within your classroom. I would also love to learn about some of the ideas you have generated within your study groups. Thanks so much and remember Izzy's mother's words of wisdom, "Did you ask a good question today?"

—John Barell

Contact John Barell by e-mail at: johnbarell@hotmail.com and jbarell@nyc.rr.com

Developing More Curious Minds was written by John Barell. This 256-page, 6" x 9" book (Stock #101246; ISBN 0-87120-719-2) is available from ASCD for $21.95 (ASCD member) and $25.95 (nonmember). Copyright 2003 by ASCD. To order a copy, call ASCD at 1-800-933-2723 (in Virginia 1-703-578-9600) and press 2 for the Service Center. Or buy the book from ASCD's Online Store.