Cultivating Curiosity

How can we cultivate curiosity in ourselves, our students, our teams or schools?

As a child we were curious about everything, wondering how things worked, what happens if I do this or that and experimenting without fear came natural to us. So what happens once we hit teenage years, or once we are in our adult life? Why do we lose that ability to play?

curiosity: the desire to know or learn, a need to know about people or things, something that arouses interest

Photo Credit: el genio del dub Flickr via Compfight cc

Play in Primary school is part of everyday learning. In the Edutopia article “15 ways to use Play-doh in the High School classroom” (Carrie Wisehart, 6th November 2017) Wisehart reminds us that “When students are forced to synthesize what they’ve learned and make a sculpture, they are doing some crazy critical thinking. Play-doh is a great way to keep students engaged, let them use their hands, employ creativity, and you can have a new and different form of assessment that is actually fun.”

The same can be said for Lego. Lego Serious Play is becoming a staple in classrooms and businesses around the world. Joel Birch (The Very Serious Business Co. and Certified Facilitator of LEGO® Serious Play®) and Liam Isaac (Head of Engineering, Enterprise and Technology at Cheltenham Ladies College, UK) are doing amazing things with students and teachers, integrating thinking as a routine practice.

In her talk “Play On” at the Learning 2 conference in Warsaw, Poland, Elizabeth Perry reminds us that almost all creativity involves purposeful play. She talks us through her own experiences of new learning and how she nearly gave up when faced with a failed drawing.

Play lights up our brains

Creativity and curiosity go hand in hand and I explore this notion in the video below, made in preparation for a talk about creativity a few years ago in Singapore:

How might you tap into your own creativity?

What are you curious to know more about - what is stopping you?