Five Techniques to Trigger Curiosity in Students
Curiosity is a great motivating tool for students. Students would want to learn new concepts when they feel curious about them. Curiosity can be a helpful tool in keeping children’s interest levels in their subjects. We are listing down five techniques to build up curiosity in students at school:
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Become Curious as a Teacher
It would be best if you started to work on curiosity from yourself as a parent or teacher. Try learning a new skill or try playing a new sport. You will feel how passionate you would be to try new things. You can try meeting people in the markets and chat with them for a while. This will develop your curiosity. You can then present this example to your students, and they will feel more motivated to follow your example.
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Follow Questioning & Response Approach
A curious teaching style starts with questions rather than answers. Researchers believe that presenting answers to questions isn’t the right approach for teaching students. The formal learning starts from the questions. However, the questions must not end up with yes or no answers. They must require detailed reasoning.
You can ask some of these questions:
What would have happened if things went another way round?
What would it feel like to experience this?
Why did he not do this?
How do we know that his actions were right?
What did you think about his next move?
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Deliver Facts through Questions
A more productive rule is to follow the fact, question & response method. You should deliver every new concept with a question. Consider you are teaching gravity of the earth to students, and you ask your students what would have happened if there was no gravity?. You will hear many curious responses to this question.
This will build motivation in students to hear more about this topic. You will further notice that students will start questioning themselves on every subject they learn.
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Encourage Attentive Listening
Active & attentive listening is a great skill. You must teach this skill to your students by following the one yourself. You must pay all ears to your students’ questions to encourage their curiosity to know more about a particular topic. It would help if you also rephrased your student’s questions to let them know that repeating the sentences clarifies any doubt in understandings. A teacher should also ask further questions to students about the topic that they haven’t learned. This will build their interests levels in active listening of class sessions.
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Look for the Curiosity Points
Every student has a personalized liking preference. Some are sports lovers, while some are tech geeks. A teacher must trace out the interest levels of their student. Any challenging subject can be turned relatively easy if the teacher knows the right strategy to deliver the tough lessons. If you are going to teach geography, you must try to find out students’ interests. If a student is a soccer lover, you can start with little history of land and features of the land that make up playgrounds.
You can also teach physics by asking your student to find physics in their moving bikes or vehicles. This will keep up their curiosity levels in every subsequent lesson.
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Teach in Ten minutes Chunks
After you have built up students’ curiosity in every lesson, it’s time to schedule the correct information at the right time. You should not overload students even if you keep up the curiosity factors. Researchers suggest that after every ten to twenty minutes of the online class session, a student needs at least two minutes of break to digest the information. You must schedule your lesson in 10 to 20 minutes packages with regular breaks schedule to keep up with students’ interest levels and the right curiosity factors.
We at mytutorpod implement curiosity in every lesson. Our teachers craft every course lesson with many questions to maintain the highest curiosity levels of students in one-to-one online tutoring sessions.
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