Curiosity comes from within—we just have to know how to unleash it. We learn by engaging and exploring, asking questions and testing out answers. Yet our classrooms are not always places where such curiosity is encouraged and supported. Cultivating Curiosity in K–12 Classrooms describes how teachers can create a structured, student-centered environment that allows for openness and surprise, where inquiry guides authentic learning. Award-winning educator Wendy L. Ostroff shows how to foster student curiosity through exploration, novelty, and play; questioning and critical thinking; and experimenting and problem solving. With techniques to try, scaffolding advice, and relevant research from neuroscience and psychology, this book will help teachers harness the powerful drive in all learners—the drive to know, understand, and experience the world in a meaningful way.
This essential guidebook offers creative, exciting ways for teachers to implement and support deep, authentic and transformative learning in early childhood. Each standalone chapter identifies a key focus for empowering children, exploring the research behind the habit, how it stimulates deep learning and the ways in which it can help address implicit hierarchies and disrupt oppression. Chapters feature hands-on activities, ideas for lessons and events that teachers can try, alongside techniques to involve parents and families, bringing this important work beyond the classroom walls.
Ostroff highlights processes that propel learning (including play and collaboration), distilling the research into the most important ideas teachers need to design pedagogy and curriculum.
Human beings are born to learn. During the last few decades, developmental science has exploded with discoveries of how, specifically, learning happens. This provides us with an unprecedented window into children's minds: how and when they begin to think, perceive, understand, and apply knowledge. Wendy Ostroff builds on this research and shows you how to harness the power of the brain, the most powerful learning machine in the universe. She highlights the processes that inspire or propel learning--play, confidence, self-regulation, movement, mnemonic strategies, metacognition, articulation, and collaboration--and distills the research into a synthesis of the most important takeaway ideas that teachers will need as they design their curriculum and pedagogy. Each chapter has suggested activities for exactly how teachers can put theory into practice in the classroom. When you understand how your students learn, you will know how to teach them in ways that harness the brain's natural learning systems. Dr. Wendy L. Ostroff is Associate Professor in the Program for the Advancement of Learning at Curry College.
Curiosity comes from within—we just have to know how to unleash it. We learn by engaging and exploring, asking questions and testing out answers. Yet our classrooms are not always places where such curiosity is encouraged and supported. Cultivating Curiosity in K–12 Classrooms describes how teachers can create a structured, student-centered environment that allows for openness and surprise, where inquiry guides authentic learning. Award-winning educator Wendy L. Ostroff shows how to foster student curiosity through exploration, novelty, and play; questioning and critical thinking; and experimenting and problem solving. With techniques to try, scaffolding advice, and relevant research from neuroscience and psychology, this book will help teachers harness the powerful drive in all learners—the drive to know, understand, and experience the world in a meaningful way.
This essential guidebook offers creative, exciting ways for teachers to implement and support deep, authentic and transformative learning in early childhood. Each standalone chapter identifies a key focus for empowering children, exploring the research behind the habit, how it stimulates deep learning and the ways in which it can help address implicit hierarchies and disrupt oppression. Chapters feature hands-on activities, ideas for lessons and events that teachers can try, alongside techniques to involve parents and families, bringing this important work beyond the classroom walls.
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