Students and Teachers Exploring the World Together!

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Layering Wonderment Throughout the Required Curriculum

by

Rebecca Cummings

When I was in the third grade I was lucky enough to have a teacher who allowed her students to wander. Her classroom was full of interesting places to go. As I remember it now, the room was full of the natural wonders of science: a noisy guinea pig with a food chart attached to the cage, a mini greenhouse with seedlings and observation journals, microscopes and slides, a measurement station with everything from gallon jugs to medicine droppers. Opportunities for science exploration were all around us just as they are in real life. In real life we do not stop and think, "I've had an hour of reading so I better switch to math now."

Back then, as a 9-year old, I did not reflect on why I wanted to learn. It was the experience of discovering new things that inspired me to go to school. However, now that I am a mother with my own third grader and a new teacher with a room full of fifth graders, I think about that experience. I reflect about how that teacher inspired the wonderment that transformed 9-year-olds into potential scientists.

Two years ago, in my mid-forties, I began my teaching career. Luckily, I had life skills to keep my head above water, but all the daunting tasks commensurate with teaching can be like lead boots in a very deep ocean. When you are a new teacher everything is dictated by some handbook or manual. All the ideas you had while you were studying to be a teacher get buried in the ever present and often overwhelming requirements of school operations.

Administrative Emails, My Learning Plan Reminders , State GLEs, Curriculum Maps, Team Meetings, and Fire Drill Safety Procedures weigh down your days and you hear the students through the fog as they call you back to why you became a teacher. They are hungry for information that will not bore them, groaning when the assignment begins to leave your lips. They are such skeptical ten year olds! Ah, but they have had years of this already, right? "Open your books to page 112, read the lesson, do the checkpoint questions on page 115 and we will go over them tomorrow." Phew! The teacher follows the map and, if she is careful with the review the next day, the students just might remember the details in a week when she has to give them a test… but only if she reviews again right before the test!

But as a new teacher I needed help deciding what to cover and where to go. I needed the maps and the manuals, but not as tour guides. I wanted the materials to help me answer all those questions I could not begin to formulate on my own. What to do?

So I dissected the Science curriculum. I took the maps and the teachers' manuals and the GSEs and I molded them to fit the hunger. Will children really care about food chains? They might if I show them what owls eat when they pick apart the furry pellets. Will the students understand what it means to actually be alive? Maybe they will if I have them observe some yeast first. Why should they really care about a plant growing in a cup? Maybe they will want to know more about it if we cut open some seeds first, discuss what is in there that magically creates a root system and can perform that photosynthesis show they've heard about.

I know that we as teachers are taught to try and "hook" the students at the beginning of a lesson. We activate prior knowledge, analyze what they've studied before, and apply this new information to the map. We are to differentiate for various learning styles and display flexibility. But why not have the children invest in the quality at which they are most proficient, using their curiosity? Let's give the student, the child, more credit for understanding what they don't know. When we observe from a closer place we can guide them through research, using dialogue that is rich with pertinent questions and meaningful conclusions.

At the time of this writing, it is June, nine months after I took this adventuresome, winding path with my class. These students are thoughtful now, less programmed, more daring and curious. One of my students has been closely following his own sunflower seed for 3 months. It is blooming in the window. He rushes in daily to see how much taller it is, wondering at the new seeds inside. This student was incredibly shy and skittish and hard to keep on task. Now he guzzles any kind of new science activity, always the first to list new questions and get his group together to create a way to test his theories. I have several other students whose notebooks could be archived at the Smithsonian. Their detailed drawings and observations have the eye of seasoned scientists and journalists.

It is hard to let these scientists, thinkers, go on to sixth grade. What will become of them? Can I write a checklist for their new teacher? I hope they are allowed the same freedom of thought and wonderment as I tried to provide. How do you help students to discover their own talents and then send them out into what can be a stifling world of disconnected text and stale information?

My own third grade teacher seemed to understand that her role was to provide experiences that would create questions and interest in minds that are only just beginning to grow. Instead of dictating facts and findings, the teacher can allow the students to form their own opinions, connecting knowledge to what they witness in the world. Is that boring? No! It's powerful. Is that structured? Yes, but the structure is buried rather than leading. The maps are still there, the curriculum still present, but this method of inquiry creates a world of wonderment that is exciting and unpredictable, where even the smallest discovery is a gift from which the children will tear the wrapping off and remember. So now I get to be more than just an overwhelmed new teacher, I get to be a scientist of learning. I teach and my students teach me… and that's how it ought to be if we truly want to be transformative.

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