Cultivating Curiosity

"We do not want complacent pupils, but eager ones;
we seek to sow life in the child rather than theories."
—Dr. Maria Montessori, To Educate the Human Potential

One of the things I love about working with children is that they’re naturally inquisitive. They wonder about the world around them, and they ask great questions! I’m not afraid to tell you that they regularly ask questions to which I don’t have an answer. This is a good thing. It means the children begin to understand that learning, acquiring knowledge, is a life-long journey of discovery. They will have the tools (and hopefully desire) to keep learning long after they have left Room 28. Rather than an expert standing in front of the class, attempting to pour my “vast” knowledge into their empty-vessel brains, we are partners in exploration. Frequently, I answer their questions with, “I don’t know, but that’s a great question. Why don’t you do some research and find out for us.”

Until this year, that was too often the end of it because we didn’t have a system for following through. I hated that the children asked such thoughtful questions and yet, they were often forgotten as our busy lives marched on without pursuit of answers. So this year, I decided we should keep a record of all those great questions—hence our Great Questions Book. This was quickly adopted into our Class Meeting routine. Our student Facilitator checks the Great Questions Book for new questions and asks for volunteers to investigate.

A few weeks ago, a wonderful question appeared in the Great Questions Book: Do twins have the same fingerprints? “Wow! I’m not sure, but now I want to know!” I thought to myself. It is easy to model amazement and wonder for the children when they ask such great questions. I suspect this question arose because our class includes one member of a pair of identical twins. (The other twin is in the classroom next door.) “How could we find out?” I challenged the class. Together, we designed an investigation. Both twins allowed me to ink and print each finger five times (periodically using their math skills to calculate how many fingerprints were left to do) so that all five Cooperative Science Groups would have sets of fingerprints for examination. Thanks to a generous group of donors from DonorsChoose, we also acquired our very own class microscopes to aid in this investigation.

The investigation was on, and the children easily shifted into the role of scientific detectives (complete with magnifying glasses!), eager to solve the mystery. Armed with the two sets of fingerprints and a few pages about fingerprint patterns and classification, each Cooperative Science Group worked together to gather evidence that would ultimately support or dispute their hypothesis. There was a busy but productive hum in the room as the groups worked, and then we gathered together again for the groups to present their observations and conclusions. Interestingly, in their observations the groups had not all focused in on the same sets of fingers as evidence for their conclusions.

Early in the week, as I collected the sets of fingerprints, I was amazed and fascinated by what I saw and I knew the children would be too. I had expected the fingerprints to be quite similar, perhaps with very subtle differences that might be difficult for the children to detect. Instead, the differences on several fingers were dramatic and distinct. Mrs. D. and I were both surprised.

I love it when our hypotheses are wrong! Somehow our culture transmits the idea that making mistakes or being “wrong” is not O.K. Until I instituted the practice of recording hypotheses in pen, the children often felt the urge to erase and “correct” a hypothesis that was not supported by the evidence gathered in their experiment, but as I regularly remind the children, that’s when real discovery happens—when you find out you were wrong. If our hypotheses were always correct, there wouldn’t be much point in experimenting.

Unfortunately, I think even professional scientists and researchers sometimes forget this. The preeminent experts in a field often wield too much influence, and ideas (and evidence!) that run counter to popular thought are too easily ignored or dismissed. I worry about what we might be missing because someone (or a group of someones) is too invested in one answer to a question. As humans, we sometimes attend only to the evidence that supports our expectations and fail to leave our senses open to other possibilities. I observe this every year when the children perform the apocryphal Galileo/Leaning Tower of Pisa gravity experiment by dropping two balls of different mass with the same volume and shape. Often, the children see and hear only what they expect to—that the heavier ball will land first. It takes encouragement for the children to really attend to their senses and step away from their preconceived ideas about what they expect to happen.

This tendency to be so certain of an answer (or so afraid of admitting we’re wrong) that we ignore evidence to the contrary starts early and lingers long. In middle and high school science, my friends and I would often figure out what “the right answer” was supposed to be and then work the lab backwards so that our "observations" matched that answer. But this focus on “right” inhibits discovery and slows our learning as a culture. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’s “final answer” has little place in science and learning. When I was my students’ age, I was taught that Brontosaurus was the name of that big plant-eating dinosaur and Pluto was a planet. Science isn’t static. Invite doubt in and welcome a sense of wonder. Ask Great Questions and investigate. As Ms. Frizzle says, “Take chances, make mistakes, get messy!”

Special thanks to twins N.J. and N.J. for the inspiration to ask and the evidence to answer this great question. I sent them home with very inky fingers. Science is messy!

3-20-09: Listen to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's keynote address about science education at the NSTA 2009 National Conference