"Curiosity has no place in our school. We are here for education!"
These words fell from my cooperating teacher's lips during my initial tour of the Chinese middle/high school where I would end up teaching for two years. Mr. Yang's chest swelled with pride as we passed classroom after classroom, each jammed with 60 students, each one of whom was either chanting in unison or silently taking notes from impeccable blackboards. We continued our walk down a long corridor past basic, cement-walled classrooms. As the tour ended, Mr. Yang smiled and handed me my only teaching resources—a cane and a blue and silver cassette tape player already loaded with a recording of a language listening text. "This tape contains all that the students must know. You are a good, faithful teacher. The students respect the cane." The tour had ended and my teaching career had begun.
I wanted to cry. A cane and a cassette player would do little to support my dream of a classroom where students felt encouraged to be creative and chose to be engaged because of their innate curiosity. Although I was desperate to discover my students' interests, Mr. Yang had made it clear that I was required to work within the boundaries of the school's culture and the national curriculum. Despite these grim first impressions, I found three ways to let curiosity creep back into my classroom.
- Surprise each other. One of my own high school teachers greeted us on the first day of school with a trash can on his head. The shock of such an unorthodox action prompted the class to begin the year with a questioning spirit. In China, it turned out that my Western-ness, combined with the absence of the cassette player on the first day, was the equivalent of wearing a trash can, and the students displayed plenty of curiosity. Our language lessons began with forming "do" questions in English, which was right in line with curricular requirements.Safety often goes hand in hand with predictability, and routines dominate classrooms in the name of security, stability, efficiency, and more effective behavior management. Although it is admirable and necessary to strive for a safe space in our schools, we can become complacent in our habits. A study by Li and colleagues in 2003, and another by <LINK URL="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/learning-by-surprise/" LINKTARGET="_blank">Fenker and Schütze in 2008</LINK>, found that novelty increased retention, supporting the importance of surprise in the classroom.
- Model powerful questions. Once my students could form questions well, we moved on to the content of their questions. "What is your name?" was a predictable starting point for my Chinese students, but they had never been trained to move beyond the scripted question-and-answer models in their textbooks. My students became more enthusiastic English speakers when they learned that, by using vocabulary they already knew, they could construct more probing questions like "What does your name mean?" This discovery took discussions to a whole different level of curiosity.When I returned to the United States to teach more proficient English speakers, I would often put "Curiosity Question Starters" on the walls to encourage the students to evolve their own critical questions. Queries such as "How can you prove that?" or "Can you explain why you think that?" remind students to challenge one another to think critically and make students responsible for their own higher-order thinking.
- Cede control. My classroom in China was designed to afford the teacher maximum control. I stood on a raised platform from which I could see every move of the 60 students who remained neatly tucked into four long rows of wooden desks throughout my classes. I will admit, on the day that the students hung four white cotton string "racetracks" across the room and raced balloon rockets as part of a lesson on using comparative statements authentically, I struggled to keep the noise down. However, during the activity, the questions the students constructed about the rules for the race and optimum rocket design and the comparative forms they employed afterward to describe the outcomes of the activity resulted in more enthusiastic and authentic English language use than I had ever heard from most of them.In 1959, John Dewey wrote that for students to learn, they must receive direction and then space to construct new knowledge. This release of teacher control, however, does not mean turning over the classroom to the forces of chaos. Instead, surrendering control means not knowing or being able to predict an outcome. In the case of my Chinese students, learning came from a curiosity-driven exploration of possible answers to an open-ended problem.
When I was in China in the early 1990s, it seemed inconceivable that I could ever find American students as unaccustomed to choice, questioning, and expressions of curiosity as my Chinese students upon my arrival. Sadly, poorly developed busywork assignments and a focus on testing has brought my reality in China in the '90s to the United States of the 2010s. However, these three simple examples taken from my experience show that curiosity can have a place in American schools, and it does not require additional funding or deviation from the curriculum. To bring curiosity back to the classroom, we simply need to cede more control to students and lift the limits on what they can imagine and create.