Thursday 26 January 2017
On Curiosity and Wonderment
Australian of the Year awards:
Biomolecular scientist Alan Mackay-Sim receives 2017 honour.
So here we are again, the beginning of another school year
in Australia. A brand-new set of
students, each with their own strengths, attitudes, and degrees of self-confidence
towards learning mathematics.
As a high school Mathematics teacher, have renewed my Mathematics
teaching goals this year, and they are not about grades, achievement standards,
or personal accountability. Those are expected elements of my role as a teacher.
My personal goals for teaching mathematics are directed at engaging my
learners:
Goal 1: to love mathematics
Goal 2: to challenge themselves
Goal 3: to embrace curiosity and wonderment when exploring
maths
Why these goals? I
want maths to come alive for my students as it does for me. And I want to help my students to unlock
their potential for learning in the same way that our Australian of the Year,
Alan Mackay-Sim did.
Australian of the Year 2017 used his curiosity and wonderment about the biology of the nose and sense of
smell to assist with the first successful restoration of mobility in a
quadriplegic man in 2014. Imagine that….an
expert on noses helps a man to walk again.
Now that is a powerful endorsement for teaching students to engage with curiosity and wonderment.
Curiosity and Wonderment is nothing new. It is embedded in Art
Costa’s ‘Habits of Mind’ which have been around for a long time. As maths teachers, however, I think it is
time to re-embrace the ‘Habits of Mind’ as intentional ‘learning outcomes’
within our lessons.
During my years of teaching, I have found that Curiosity and Wonderment needs to be to
explicitly ‘re-taught’ to most of my students.
By reconnecting students with their innate senses of curiosity and wonderment they will be
able to draw on these to play, explore and find solutions such as the ‘Stem
Cell Breakthrough’ achieved by our Australian of the Year, 2017, Alan
Mackay-Sim.
How do we teach curiosity and wonderment? It is nothing new. The first step is to
include as a learning outcome for the lesson something such as the following:
- · In this lesson, students will learn to develop their curiosity by asking questions….to challenge what they believe that they know…
- · In this lesson, students will develop their wonderment and awe by ‘changing the conditions’ for a problem and then having fun figuring it out.
Maths teachers have always had techniques to implement ‘Curiosity
and Wonderment’ in the classroom.
Unfortunately, we kind of kill it by giving it a more maths sounding
name: the dreaded
“INVESTIGATION”.
Simple Solution: Change the lexicon.
Curiosity and Wonderment are the ‘creative and natural’
words for something we strive to do all the time in Mathematics……
…..Conjecture
and Proof.
So next time you plan to ‘introduce an investigation’ into
your lesson, I challenge you to throw caution to the wind, and just tell the
students that in today’s lesson we are going to ‘play'. The play needs of course to have a relevant
purpose – one connected to the topic of a lesson. And, the ‘language of curiosity and wonderment’ must be modelled by the
teacher…..
…..I
wonder what would happen if we increased the weight of……
….What
if we tried to make it …..
….I
wonder if we can find a pattern that will help us to predict….
….I
am curious to know if it would work with hexagons as well as pentagons…
Maybe, by just tweaking the language that we use when
inspiring our students to engage with mathematics, we can encourage more of
them to join us in our wonderful world of Mathematics.
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