Teachers can spend a lot of time creating a wonderful curriculum and planning wonderful lessons. They craft resources to support learning, plan out explanations of difficult concepts, think through challenging questions and design activities with care.
However, all this time and hard work leads to nothing if the pupils in the classroom don’t then pay attention.
As humans, we are constantly bombarded with information from our senses, almost all of which goes unnoticed. We only pay attention to a tiny amount of what is in front of us at any one time. But to learn something, we need to be paying attention to it.
So how do we ensure that pupils are paying attention to what we want them to? By sparking their curiosity.
Curiosity, knowledge and attention
In The Science of Storytelling, author Will Storr suggests that there is a positive relationship between curiosity and knowledge, at least at first. When we know nothing about a topic, we have little curiosity about it.
But as our knowledge increases, we become more curious and desire to know more. We start to sit up and pay attention. However, if we think we know enough about the subject already, our curiosity dwindles away. So, managing curiosity - and with it, attention - is about managing knowledge.
Many teachers will be well aware of the benefits of using curiosity in the classroom. It is why so many schools urge teachers to begin lessons by creating a need to know. However, very little guidance is then given on how to create this need.
Storr points to the work of Loewenstein and his paper The Psychology of Curiosity, in which he provides four steps to sparking curiosity.
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1. Present a puzzle
Many teachers have started to frame their curriculums around overarching topic questions, so rather than a topic on “volcanoes” there is one asking, “Why are some volcanoes more destructive than others?”
This is a great starting point, as long as each individual lesson builds into this bigger question with reminders of the journey they are on to find the answer. It can be useful to think about what question this lesson, or this part of the lesson, is designed to answer - and then, importantly, communicate it to the class.
2. Create anticipation
The second of Loewenstein’s steps is to expose people to a sequence of events with an unknown but anticipated outcome. We pay attention when we are trying to predict the future and thinking about this prediction means we have to think hard about what we already know.
We can do this in the classroom by reading a section of the text we will be studying, describing an event from history or showing an artist beginning to work in a particular medium, and asking what happens next. Once people have made a prediction, they want to know if they are right.
3. Violate expectations
Thirdly, Loewenstein says to violate expectations as this triggers a search for an explanation. This can follow on neatly from the predictions that pupils have made, especially if those predictions are based on commonly held misconceptions.
Pictures, data or other artefacts can play an important role here in confounding expectations. They can provide concrete proof that what we thought was true is not - and make us question why this is.
4. Create a performance
Finally, we have the curiosity that arises from knowing that someone else has the answer. It helps to know that our curiosity will be sated. And this is somewhere that the dynamics of the classroom come into our favour. Pupils expect their teachers to know the answers to the questions they have posed.
What becomes important, then, is an element of performance: a little showmanship, teasing information, showing enthusiasm and selling the mystery.
It is why watching excellent teachers at work is such a delight; they are storytellers at heart and they know the power that stories have to create curiosity and keep us wanting more.
Mark Enser is a freelance writer and author
