In today's episode, I'm exploring six reasons why I believe curiosity is
waning and what we can do about it.
Before I kick off today's episode, I want to acknowledge Dori 2 5 0 9 for your
five-star review and recommending Blooming Curious as a top-notch show for homeschool
parents and early learning teachers.
Thanks Dori!
It's comments like this that keep us podcasters going because without
reviews, we have no idea if what we're doing is actually being well received.
So thank you.
I really appreciate you taking the time to leave a comment.
Today, I'm kicking off our inquiry and curiosity series.
For the next few months we're going to dive deeply into the
strategies that keep kids curious.
And how to implement them into your classroom or homeschool space.
Each one of us is born curious with an innate drive to explore and discover
and understand the world around us.
And the way we discover the world is through our senses.
This is why babies and young children touch everything put their fingers
in their mouth, turn towards voices and sounds and discover how they
influence their surroundings.
When they pull the cat's tail
there's a loud meow, when they push a ball it rolls away from them.
When they play with a rubber duck in the bath that pops up each
time they push it under the water.
Every experience is learning experience.
And with every experience they build, schema.
Which is the type of information web in their brains
that's becoming more detailed with every minute and with every interaction.
In early childhood.
That drive to explore and question and play is curiosity.
Curiosity forms the cornerstone of all learning and discovery.
And that initial interest and curiosity naturally leads to inquiry.
It's a perfect natural transition.
And it's inquiry that we facilitate all those, that cognitive development,
the skills like questioning and finding out and experimenting and testing,
and furthermore, it's our curiosity then that drives us to ask more
questions and make new connections and try and solve problems.
So if curiosity is so innate in all of us, Why are we losing it?
Well, there are a number of factors that influence an extinguish curiosity.
So I've been having a read and a lot of thinking, and these are the reasons
that I think are some of the main drivers of a lack of curiosity, or just that
curiosity is no longer being nurtured.
Number one is poverty, family and malnutrition.
And this takes me back to Maslow's hierarchy.
I wrote about it in a post entitled Maslow's hierarchy of needs:
nurturing curiosity in kids.
I'll link to it in the show notes.
And it speaks for itself., Children that are raised in homes where there
is significant poverty, perhaps abuse, addiction, homelessness, mental health
issues in the family, and of course a lack of proper nutrition are not going to have
as many experiences to grow that schema.
They will have few opportunities for language development and expression.
They may have difficulties with learning memory and concentration.
They'll have reduced opportunities and experiences to interact with
books, educational toys, and outings.
As a side note, I must add that there are many beautiful stories of children who
have been raised in these environments and have gone on to do incredible things.
So, although these factors certainly don't give children a great start, there
are individuals who have not let their upbringing define their future, and
despite the limitations, have indeed defied the odds stacked against them.
But sadly, we don't hear enough of these stories.
I also wanted to mention an article by Bruce D. Perry, where he talks about
the reasons for curiosity fading.
And he says there are three common ways that adults, which links to
that whole thing of family crush curiosity and curious children.
He says fear kills curiosity.
And I think this is very obvious.
If a child is fearful, they won't take risks to explore.
He says that adult disapproval will crush curiosity.
And when you react with disgust at that snail on the palm of their
hands or the dirt on their knees, and you're always telling them,
don't do this, don't do that.
Don't hurt yourself.
Don't climb.
You're basically saying don't explore.
So we're removing that innate desire to discover.
Because children want approval, they'll put their own desire for
exploration aside to seek the approval of the adults in their lives.
An absent adult caregiver.
Means the opportunity to share and get reinforcement about their discoveries
is removed as is that sense of safety.
When we look back at Maslow's hierarchy we clearly see when
these things are not in place, very challenging for children to thrive.
I believe that technology has a role to play in the waning
of curiosity in our children.
And I know they're going to be a lot of people who just throw up
their hands and say what garbage.
Let me explain.
Technology is definitely a vehicle for curiosity.
But when it comes to developing brain of a young child, which we know grows
through the creation of schema, or this web of knowledge, Imagine for
a moment, those models of molecules.
With each experience a child has another one of those little nodes
or balls in that web is formed.
And another little connection is made.
So that model, that web increases in size.
Each one of those little balls or experiences are linked, and each time
the child has a new experience it builds on all those previous experiences.
With curiosity, each experience is a new learning and that includes failures.
Because through failures and mistakes, the child learns what works and what doesn't.
And if they want to carry water from one place to the sand pit to another,
and there's a hole in the bucket.
They learn very quickly that they need to make a plan to close the hole
or somehow to find another bucket.
This equates to problem solving to scientific testing and experimenting.
This child is learning to shift their thinking.
But imagine now when a child is on a device, Yes, there are interactive games
that require thinking and problem solving.
But these are one dimensional and not to mention addictive.
When all of us on devices, we receive a dopamine hit.
We're hooked on the likes and the follows kids are hooked on the
coins that they may be earning in a game, getting to the next level.
Not to mention what that flickering screen might be doing to a developing brain.
Now I'm no scientist.
And I haven't spent years conducting research about this.
But I have read.
And most importantly, I am a parent and an educator for over a decade.
And in my time I have witnessed firsthand the change in children.
With each year, since the introduction of technology, especially the one-to-one
technology that we're seeing in schools now, children's behaviors have changed.
As parents, I'm sure that you yourself have noticed how your children's
behavior changes when they spend long periods of time on technology.
When a child is receiving input, only from a device they are missing out
on multi-sensory and multidimensional experiences that come from interacting
with world and with people around them.
Not even to mention this phenomenon, that myself and my colleagues around
the world are noticing, and that is the children upon entering school
have increasingly poor oral language.
they increasingly struggle to express themselves, and they
increasingly lack in vocabulary.
And this comes from a lack of input to grow those little mind models that
schema that I've been talking about.
One of the reasons I became interested in nature and inquiry based learning
all those years ago, was because I got really frustrated with the lack of
curiosity in the children that I was teaching and increasingly they were
kids who already lacked that spark that twinkle in the eye when it comes
to curiosity, and excitement to learn.
Besides the fact that having curiosity makes learning richer,
it also has another benefit.
And that is that it has the power to intrinsically motivate us.
When you're not curious, you have no interest in learning.
You have no interest in trying to solve your own problems.
You have no interest in new information.
So many times I've had conversations with parents and they're telling me
my child's not interested in anything.
The only thing they're interested in is playing games on the iPad.
But on the other hand, how many times have we encountered
children who don't want to think.
They don't want to explore the limits of their own thinking.
They are happy for us to just give them information so that they can regurgitate
it onto a worksheet or in an assessment.
And as humans.
We're prone to laziness.
We want someone else to solve our problems for us.
We don't want to put in the hard yards, we want a pill to
solve our problems or a device.
Like right now.
I'm trying to learn Italian and I just want someone to open my brain, put all
that stuff in so that I can just know it.
Cause it's just so damn hard.
So children, and even us adults need to understand that they need to do the
hard yards, they need to stop and they need to think at times to use their
brains, to figure out how to solve a problem, and how to be self aware of our
emotions and what's going on around us.
I believe this lack of curiosity in ourselves opens the door
for others to exploit us.
Think about advertising, fast food, junk toys, the desire to keep buying.
This comes from a lack of self-awareness the inability to
stop and reflect and question.
In recent times, nothing made this clearer to me than the handling of COVID.
Those that dared to question and examine and think were labelled conspiracy
theorists and even arrested just for asking questions, irrespective of
whether what they were asking was true or not, we weren't allowed to think.
Some people just weren't allowed to question and have an opinion.
There's so many more examples in society right now where we're
being fed information and expected to just believe it to be true.
You know, the late great Ken Robinson said that schools kill creativity, well,
I'd add that governments and the media fueled the destruction of curiosity.
They rely on us being passive consumers of information.
And if we live our lives as passive consumers, then our children are in
grave danger, of themselves becoming passive instead of active creators.
The way we get kids to be creators of knowledge and creators of products and
creators of new ideas and creators of new thinking is to encourage curiosity.
So perhaps it's not the device or the technology itself that stifles our
curiosity, but instead how we as adults introduce the idea of the technology.
Yes, the world is changing.
The jobs of the future are technology focused.
And as technology becomes more sophisticated.
Just look at AI
for example, computers will likely be able to do most jobs and that my
friends is the one reason we must cultivate curiosity in our children.
Because they will need to be the ones that program, those computers,
that solve the problems that the world has an will be facing.
And the ability to problem solve and create does not come from a passive
consumer of entertainment and knowledge.
But rather the active pursuer of it.
And so I think we adults have a role in the extinguishing of
curiosity in our kids, because we have taken our eye off the prize.
We ourselves have become the passive consumers of information and technology
and in turn have become complacent when it comes to doing the hard yards
and creating the type of environments where children can thrive, be creative
problem solvers and critical thinkers.
So this will sound really depressing.
Doesn't it?
But sometimes we need to be honest with ourselves.
And if we are to make real changes.
And as curious adults, of course, we want to know how can we fix this?
How can we continue to nurture that innate curiosity that every child is born with?
To cultivate curiosity in children we don't need to be highly sophisticated,
but we do need to be curious ourselves.
We need to model curiosity.
We need to be asking questions, modeling finding solutions,
modeling our thinking process.
As children watch us, they develop schema, their brain webs are growing
and as adults, the parents and the educators, we cannot be passive.
We must be the drivers showing kids what it means to be curious.
And we can only do that if we, if we ourselves are curious.
Next we have to encourage questioning.
Remember how young children ask a ton questions.
Well, we need to encourage more of that and we also need
to encourage tough questions.
Those that are open-ended whose answers cannot easily be found.
But may need a bit of exploration and experimentation.
So instead of just giving our children and our learners, the answers,
we need to ask more questions.
And the third way, I think we can encourage and nurture our
children's curiosity is by encouraging them to find answers.
We need to show them how to find the answers explicitly.
Perhaps it means reading a book about the topic or watching a national
geographic video, or actually going outside and planting a garden or
taking a trip, and doing an experiment.
Next allowing kids to play freely and independently.
As I mentioned in episode 16, unstructured free play is how kids
learn and builds that schema that helps them develop cognitive, physical,
and social and emotional skills.
Unstructured play is probably the most important thing we can do to
encourage children to be curious.
And that brings me to where the best place is to play.
And certainly we need to provide an interesting environment for
kids, both indoors and outdoors.
In episodes 12 and 13, we explored how educators can provide interesting
learning environments, both inside and outside for children.
Children aren't going to be able to build schema in a sterile environment.
One of the best environments that nurture curiosity is of course nature.
And nature provides everything that children need to explore and thrive.
Nature is the ultimate provocation.
When kids are playing, they discover critters, which could
lead to an inquiry project.
They build, they balance on logs, they run, they play in the sand, they
roll down Hills, they build forts they learned to cooperate with others.
Nature is also the place where we can teach kids how to observe
the world around us and nurture awareness of our surroundings.
And so next week I have a very special guest on the show.
The wonderful Victoria Hackett from outdoor classrooms.com.
She will be sharing all her tips and ideas for getting kids outdoors
and learning outdoors and the benefits of learning outside.
So make sure you follow or subscribe so you're notified when that episode is
published and you won't miss out on that.
Next, I think we should be providing open-ended materials for creative
expression and problem solving.
When it comes to toys, there's really no need to spend a fortune.
Objects from nature, empty boxes, recycled containers, all make
ideal objects for creativity.
We've all seen how quickly children lose interest in toys and prefer the box
they came in.
And if you must buy toys, look for those that allow for open-ended play.
Where children can use it for different types of play.
In this category, I would include art supplies, blocks, Lego, high
quality animal figurines like those from the Schleish brand.
And I'm not a, an affiliate for them at all, I just love them because I
had them for my kids and they're in storage, waiting for the next generation.
And they're such high quality, they'll never end up in landfill because they
can be used generation upon generation much better than those low quality
cheap plastic toys that really hold very little interest for children over time.
Next is to provide opportunities for thinking and problem solving.
Using games, things like dominoes, card games, monopoly, chess, drafts,
things like that parking lot game where you have to figure out how
to get the car out of traffic jam.
Those are all great strategy games that have the added benefit of not
involving technology, but learning to play fairly, learning how to lose.
So just playing outdoors, playing games also helps kids develop resilience.
And much needed grit.
And also that schema, that brain web of information is growing.
Next read.
Cultivate a love of reading in children.
And once again, it's up to us to provide the opportunities for children
to interact with books and stories.
Have an audio book playing in the car while you're driving,
read to children every day.
Just before bedtime is a great time for reading and calming children down.
But children love listening to stories in the classroom.
Have regular times to read, but not just for teaching skills and concepts, but
just for the sheer pleasure of it too.
Make sure that there are plenty of books and your environment, and
plenty of opportunities to read.
Reading is of course the one skill and tool that provides the
answers to so many questions.
So make sure that you are not only reading, but also asking
questions about what you're reading.
Because we need to ensure kids understand what they are reading.
Just a little side story, here I was saying yesterday.
I'm trying to learn Italian,
right, as I mentioned before, Well, I can read Italian perfectly, but mostly
I haven't got a clue what I'm reading.
So, yeah, that just tells you, I'm not going to be able to learn and speak
and interact with others, unless I actually understand what I'm reading.
So it's not just about being able to read fluently, but also
understanding what we're reading.
So we must model and encourage and explicitly teach kids, how
to understand what they reading.
We need to instill those skills for comprehension in children.
. And finally, the ultimate strategy for nurturing curiosity and getting
kids happy to learn is inquiry.
It is through inquiry based learning where we can show kids and ourselves
where the gaps are in their knowledge and how to acquire the knowledge
they need to fill those gaps.
Inquiry uses all these factors that I've mentioned, and bring them together to
help children create more schema, and keep that spark, that curiosity alive.
And there are many critics of inquiry-based learning who say that
the strategy does not raise standards.
Well over the next few months, I'm going to unpack inquiry-based learning.
And take you through the inquiry cycle.
And how it benefits
children's learning.
Inquiry has a very specific purpose.
And over the next few months, I will share with you my personal way of integrating
and dovetailing inquiry across subject areas and alongside explicit instruction.
Because you see, although I'm a great proponent and fan of inquiry based
learning, because I've seen its power firsthand in my own students, I'm also a
great proponent of explicit instruction.
So for me, it's not an and or approach, but rather the
dovetailing of the two together.
So, if you're curious how to better engage your learners and get
amazing results, then make sure you subscribe or follow so you won't
miss out on those future episodes in this inquiry and curiosity series.
And today's episode is brought to you by Ed's Lessons, and Ed's Lessons,
understands the limitations and frustrations that educators experience
when it comes to lesson planning and integrating inquiry into lesson planning.
So, if you're looking for ready-made integrated lessons, linked to picture
books, or you're looking for a helping hand to get started with inquiry based
learning, then go to edslessons.com and check out the resources on offer there.
I hope that you found some value in today's episode, if you did, click
on those three dots and share it with others so they can benefit too.
And why not leave a review just like Dori did.
so that I know that you like this type of content and I'll keep making more.
And remember next week I have a guest appearance, Victoria, Hackett's coming.
So make sure you don't miss that by subscribing and following the show.
Until next week, take care of yourselves and stay blooming curious.