Curiosity and Creativity

One of the things that really surprised me when I began seriously researching the subject of teaching critical thinking skills was the importance of curiosity. Curiosity: the simple desire to know or learn about something. In hindsight, it now seems so obviously important, but when I first began looking into this it wasn't. 

Children are naturally curious. They want to know about things. What makes things work? Why are things they way they are? Why? Why? Why? 

This natural inquisitiveness helps young minds develop their thinking skills as they ask questions and get answers--even when they get wrong answers or ones that don't make sense. Why is that? Because things that don't make sense to our minds cause us to ask even more questions and so the process continues. This is a good thing.

Bruce Duncan Perry, Ph.D. is a clinician and a researcher into children’s mental health issues. As he explain: "If a child stays curious, he will continue to explore and discover.”

The problem is, many children do not stay curious. Their natural curiosity fades or worse, it is crushed. They are no longer inquisitive or feel free to ask questions. And then they grow up to be adults that are not curious. How does this happen? 

CURIOSITY CRUSHED

There are many reasons that natural curiosity can be crushed or fade. Some of the main causes are: fear, disapproval and absence. 

Fear and Disapproval: Many children have become afraid to ask questions for fear of making a mistake or giving the "wrong" answer. The sad reality is that it is usually the child's own parents and teachers that are to blame for this. When children hear negative or disparaging remarks as they struggle to learn, they tend to shut down. 

Neil deGrasse Tyson famously quipped that “we spend the first years of our children’s lives teaching them how to walk and talk, and the rest of their lives telling them to shut up and sit down.” These are lessons that are learned early and repeated often to the detriment of our children. 

Too often, our educational system focuses on teaching children that they need to find the "right" answer or get the highest possible grade; it does not equally support the process of learning as a worthy goal in and of itself. 

For many students, education means memorizing facts or learning a bunch of methods to do a problem over and over again using a collection of algorithms. They aren’t taught how to see the world differently or how to be a critical thinker.

Children learn early on that mistakes are to be avoided and all that counts is the end result. Sadly, but predictably, this stifles a child's natural curiosity, and unnecessarily so. Lacking is the encouragement to discover, create and to invent.

A major factor in this systemic failure is well-intentioned but misguided parents that swoop in and "rescue" their children at even the hint of failure. They:

• Deliver forgotten assignments
• Interfere on the playing field
• Challenge report cards

By "helicoptering" over their children they deprive them of the valuable lessons that can only come when kids persevere through mistakes and overcome difficulties. Brain research shows that more growth occurs when we are struggling to understand something than when it come easily (Moser et al., 2011). Children need to struggle, they need to make mistakes.

Educator Jessica Lahey has written extensively on the importance of allowing children to make mistakes and learn from them. These lessons are not just academically important, they are life lessons. As she explains in her book, The Gift of Failure:  

It is the setbacks, mistakes, miscalculations and failures children experience that teach them how to be resourceful, persistent, innovative and resilient citizens of the world (2015).

Clearly, these are the kinds of adults that we want our young people to grow up to be, so it is vitally important that we don't circumvent our long-term goals with short-sighted and counterproductive parenting.

Absence: The other side of the helicopter parenting coin is the absent or disengaged parent. Parents don't have to be physically absent to be uninvolved. When parents are too wrapped up in their own lives to the point that they don't know what's going on in their childrens' lives, they are stunting their children's mental and emotional growth.

There needs to be a balance then between the overly-involved and the uninvolved parent.

CULTIVATING CURIOSITY

It is vitally important then that we create an environment where children feel safe to ask questions, to explore different means to solve problems, to make mistakes and even to fail. The classroom should be a place where students feel safe to experiment and try out new ideas no matter what the subject under consideration. This idea of being allowed to make mistakes creates an environment that nurtures creativity and original thought (Chu, 2016). Parents can do much both at home and by cooperating with dedicated, caring teachers to support their children.

We all should encourage a sense of wonder and discovery, modeling this ourselves. Let everyone see that we too are curious, we are creative, we are life-long learners. Create environments where children can be creative both in the classroom and at home. Give them opportunities to explore different ideas and to be inventive in their solutions. Foster and nurture curiosity and creativity. 

And find ways to make learning fun again! 

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Sources:  Boaler, J., PhD. (2016). How to learn math: for teachers and parents. Session 1, Part 1. [YouTube video]. Retrieved from https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/Education/HTLMath/

Chu, Jason. (2016, June 6). Teaching originality and creativity to students [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://turnitin.com/en_us/resources/blog/2543-teaching-originality-and-creativity

Lahey, J. (2015). The gift of failure: how the best parents learn to let go so their children can succeed. New York, NY

Perry, Bruce D., M.D., Ph.D. Curiosity: the fuel of development. Scholastic, Inc., n.d. Web. 07 Nov. 2016.

CCIS Conference Presentation - November 7th, 2016

This last Monday, I presented on the subject of teaching critical thinking skills at the fall conference for the California Consortium of Independent Schools in San Diego, California.

Both the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) focus on the importance of teaching students critical thinking skills and stress the importance of college and career readiness, but they don’t tell us how to do that.

In this seminar we focused on just a few ways that we can guide and support our students to develop their independent learning and problem solving skills, including: fostering curiosity and creativity, overcoming obstacles such as students’ fear of failure and making mistakes, and the role of understanding emotions in thinking clearly.

Participants also discussed the importance of our relationships with our students and its connection to their academic success. Additionally, we considered what current research has shown can help us promote student engagement and the willingness to take appropriate risks as they prepare for college and/or entrance into the workforce.

Conference notes and resources are available here:

• Thinking Clearly: CCIS Presentation Fall 2016
• Slide Presentation

Look for a post-conference update soon!