Cultivating Curiosity in K-12 Classrooms: How to Promote and Sustain Deep Learning
About this ebook
We learn by engaging and exploring, asking questions and testing out answers. Yet our classrooms are not always places where such curiosity is encouraged and supported. Cultivating Curiosity in K–12 Classrooms describes how teachers can create a structured, student-centered environment that allows for openness and surprise, where inquiry guides authentic learning.
Award-winning educator Wendy L. Ostroff shows how to foster student curiosity through exploration, novelty, and play; questioning and critical thinking; and experimenting and problem solving. With techniques to try, scaffolding advice, and relevant research from neuroscience and psychology, this book will help teachers harness the powerful drive in all learners—the drive to know, understand, and experience the world in a meaningful way.
About the author
Wendy L. Ostroff, PhD, is a developmental and cognitive psychologist and a professor at the Hutchins School of Liberal Studies at Sonoma State University, a seminar-based program that prepares prospective teachers and emphasizes critical reading, writing, and thinking. The author of the book Understanding How Young Children Learn: Bringing the Science of Child Development to the Classroom (2012, ASCD), Dr. Ostroff has been designing and teaching interdisciplinary courses on child development, learning, and education for 15 years, and she offers workshops on applying child development research for scientists and practitioners. She is passionate about innovative and emergent pedagogies and state of the art teacher education.
