by Richie Manu, Academic Learning Support 30th Jan 2020

How does curiosity work? Key characteristics, what is curiosity?

Asking questions  

Entry level questions / diversive language, directly about the object or situation itself – WHAT?

Epistemic level questions, the deepening understanding – WHY/HOW?

Further levels by asking about the background, fictional questions. The core/deeper questions that take in account various contexts. Bringing it in context of culture, systemic, symbolism, various aspects of the object/subject itself in different contexts, conditional questions

Observation of lesson

Introduction

The introduction and agenda of the session was given, slightly vague orally, not visually.

Good how he engaged with the students individually, noted down name, subject area and other relevant details where he could then draw in people in direct conversation. He used these notes to help him remember names or other details of the students. He remembered very well who said which comment, question or voiced specific interest.

The session itself

I was wondering who was it for and what relevance it had as learning support as it was very theory heavy less practical.

Initially it felt rather self-promoting which would have been more suitable at the end of the session once people had a better understanding of the subject.

The beginning was very quote heavy and references of books -> generally good to give pointers for people who want to read up on more detailed information after session

The visual of the core area of interest / creative bandwidth was very useful.

He could have referred to the draft/visual again to help understand the various levels of question asking better

The question asking exercise was very good and definitely something that I want to take further

End of session

He overran slightly with the time. He checked if people were ok to stay 5-10 min longer.

At the end of the session he did a summary of what we went through in the session and gave suggestions on how we could use the practise of asking questions to help us in our own research and learning.

What I have learned from the session

For my teaching

• At the beginning of a class, if the size of the group allows it to go through one by one and let them introduce themselves, take notes that I can go back to during the session
• Ask engaging questions and encourage the learners to explore together
• Go through content and show visuals to support the oral content, ask questions to make sure that the learners are following the content.
• Introduce clear tool for learners to help them through the exercise
• Get people to work in pairs to engage in conversation and help learners to learn through each other’s thought process
• Have a simple exercise to make it easy to understand the process, then verbally go through how this can be implied in a different context
• The summary at the end of the session helps to bring the learning back together, make a conclusion of the content that we went through in a session and anchor the learning.

For my academic learning

• Write a mind map of questions that help me with the research
• Allow myself to ask more questions and practise asking more questions
• Feel into my curiosity first and let that lead me in my learning