I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity. I recall the words of my former head of school, already 70 years old, gathering her pupils in her library and saying, “You must cultivate curiosity, for only through curiosity can you learn, not only what there is in books, but what lies around you in the world of things and people.”
Eleanor Roosevelt Defends Curiosity | The Saturday Evening Post
This century brings a paradigm shift regarding education as up until a few decades ago, becoming an employee was primarily linear: get an education, get a job, retire. But look around and see how many of us had to reinvent ourselves periodically to remain relevant: get an education, get a job, re/up-skill, get a job, re/up-skill, get a job, etc.
My daughter is at the delightful age of questions and wonders. Whys, hows, whens, whats, questions seem to mushroom and jump further away. But will she have the mental stamina to maintain this burning curiosity as she grows older? I don’t know what the future holds, but there are a few things to nurture a sense of curiosity, exploration, and learning in children.
Barbara Oakley, Beth Rogowsky, and Terrence Sejnowski discuss in their free Coursera course Uncommon Sense Teaching: Building Community and Habits of Learning about the neuroscience at play regarding learning, motivation and curiosity.
Dopamine is a chemical associated with feeling good. When dopamine levels rise, our satisfaction and pleasure rise as well. Low dopamine levels might lead to a lack of motivation, tiredness, anxiety, sleep issues, etc.
Here’s the key idea. Whenever dopamine plops in at a synapse — that tiny little gap where neurons talk to each other — guess what? That dopamine helps build and strengthen those neural connections. This is why dopamine is so important in learning. The great thing is that those dollops of dopamine also make YOU feel good. There’s actually a whole system in your brain that can squirt dopamine out in different areas. Sort of like a sprinkler system.
Dopamine is at the heart of how we learn. Whenever dopamine squirts out around our synapses, it helps neurons link together more easily. When does dopamine squirt near a synapse? Whenever [we get an] unexpected reward. And not just external rewards— even an unexpected reward like having your curiosity satisfied. This leads to a dopamine spurt that causes links of learning to get locked into place.
Uncommon Sense Teaching: Building Community and Habits of Learning
We can try method A to solve a problem, and it doesn’t work. We try method B, and still no results. But method C is working! We feel great after solving this problem because our curiosity is satisfied, and dopamine is released, making us feel good. There is more: the dopamine is released on precisely those recently used neural links that allowed us to solve the problem and fix our curiosity (the neurons involved in method C).
This is exactly how we learn! Only the neurons involved in helping us to successfully learn are the ones that get their connections strengthened. […]It’s a little more complicated than this. Related molecules like serotonin are also involved. But dopamine is a key player in learning, so let’s just focus on it.
Uncommon Sense Teaching: Building Community and Habits of Learning
When we face the same problem in the future, and we must use retrieval practice to recall how we solved the problem, dopamine will still be released. However, dopamine will decrease slowly with every recall until we know how to solve the problem automatically.
If we grow bored with our work, we have little opportunity for surprises (unexpected rewards), which leads to little opportunity to release dopamine, leading to little opportunities for new learning.
If we grow curious about our work, we have more opportunities for surprises (unexpected rewards) which leads to more opportunities to release dopamine and more opportunities for better learning.
Unexpected rewards, such as becoming better and better at solving new and different problems, trigger dopamine release and Eureka moments. Sparking and maintaining a sense of wonder and curiosity in children is crucial to keep them motivated as life-long learners.
So, how do we get children to be curious?
Some children are curious by their nature. For others, we would have to connect school subjects with their natural interests with open-ended questions (answering a question with another or creating rich questions with what, what about, what if, how, etc.)
Modelling excitement, enthusiasm and curiosity are essential as children might copy our behaviours.
Being honest when we don’t have an answer and replying with open-ended questions: Where would you start looking for a solution? How about researching together? How would we do that?
Regarding praising, we must remember that if we were to praise children at every opportunity, we’d become predictable and have little prospects for unexpected rewards, which will lead, as you remember, to little opportunities for dopamine release.
What kinds of praise could we use?
A happy gasp when she [an imaginary teacher that knows how to keep her students engaged and curious about learning] sees the right solution. A trip with the class outside to take in the spring air. When students are lining up, she might make it into a game with high praise when students are quick and quiet.
Uncommon Sense Teaching: Building Community and Habits of Learning
They say that “curiosity killed the cat”. They don’t say the rest of the phrase: “…but satisfaction brought it back”. And perhaps, like a cat, multiple lives can be attained in just one by maintaining a healthy dose of curiosity and an “always be learning” mindset.