This week we talked a lot about how to plan our lessons with the expectation that students will be curious. We need to plan for our students curiosity, not just hope for it. It is important to know how curious our students are, as it has been shown that higher curiosity is correlated with higher achievement and attendance. While curiosity is difficult to measure, you can try simply asking students to rate their curiosity of the classroom on a scale of 1-10 and use that as a starting point. It is also important to remember that we are constantly modelling behaviour for our students so we should be aware of how we model curiosity.
When we plan for curiosity, we can shape our assessment around it. This allows us to use the inquiry model of assessment.
This let’s students learn about the things they are passionate about instead of just going throught the same programming as everyone. This allows the curriculum to be more individualized and thus more engaging for the students. We as educators need to find ways to assess the students on the topics they choose.