So how could you boost your school’s curiosity?
Choose one day (or week!) in the next month to highlight the importance of curiosity.
Focus on developing everyone’s curiosity using one or more of these ideas:
Assembly
Introduce the idea of open questions. What would happen if? What would it be like to? How do we know that? What did you think when? Talk about the big questions which excite or baffle you as an adult.
This article explores The Big Questions and may help inform your assembly and this BBC bitesize resource helps explain open-ended questions clearly with examples.
5 Whys
Introduce the 5 whys tool. It’s very simple. When a problem occurs, you uncover its nature and source by asking "why" no fewer than five times.
Here’s an example:
A student arrives late for a lesson.
- Why? Because I missed the bus
- Why? Because I had an argument with my mum
- Why? Because I had not got my school bag ready and she wanted to leave the house
- Why? Because I went to bed too late
- Why? Because I was playing on my X-Box.
Try the 5 Whys on similar issues.
Or you can use it on complex issues such as:
- Why is the planet getting hotter?
- Why do we laugh??
- What makes people happy?
Question Wall
Set aside part or all of one wall in as many classrooms as possible and encourage students to add open questions which interest them to it. Get them to focus on big questions to which there are no simple answers. At the end of a day/week ask each student to choose the question that intrigues them most and say why.
Do you have an Idea of the Week you’d like to share with us? Get in touch, we’d love to hear how you inspire creativity throughout your school.