Activate your students’ curiosity with… 👉 What happened before? What happens after?
Thomas Courtley
Education Specialist
Stimulating curiosity is one of the best ways to encourage active learners. It’s the dream of all teachers - Classrooms full of kids who enjoy learning. Boost their curiosity, prior knowledge, and creative thinking.
How does this learning technique activate students?
A picture is worth 1.000 words. This statement is always valid. LessonUp offers thousands of lessons with amazing videos and images. Your students can observe them on the classroom’s digital board. Images don't need to tell us a complete story. In fact, stimulating curiosity is one of the best ways to encourage active learners.This learning technique is based on the power of such catchy images. They don't tell the full story, but only part of it, exciting students’ curiosity.
Want to activate your students' curiosity? Try out our intuitive toolkit for teachers.
How do you implement it?
To implement this learning technique you can use a mind map, a catchy image, and 2 textual windows.
Step 1
Create a mind map.
Step 2
Insert the image (+ component, image) at the centre of the mind map. If you want to make the image “zoomable”, you can do so via the image settings.
Step 3
Draw a mind map on your white board or implement a digital mind map in a LessonUp slide. At the centre of the mind map insert a meaningful image that stimulates people to ask questions. If you are working digitally, make sure the image is zoomable to facilitate learners. On both sides of the image, insert the following questions: “What happened before?”, and “What happens next?”. Then ask your students to write their answers.
Step 4
If you use a LessonUp lesson, you can drag your students’ answer to one side or the other of the picture. Share them on the digital board, and check out the given answers with all your students, encouraging an open classroom discussion. If possible, guide them in the right direction without taking over the scene. It would be ideal if your students participated in a constructive conversation: what’s the story behind the image?
How does it work in the class?
This is a great way to introduce a news item, or an image related to geography, chemistry, history, or even meteorology. Everything is possible, given the right picture. Hopefully you will find something perfect for your subject matter! Then try out this straightforward, easy-to-implement, and extremely activating learning technique.
