The Curious Classroom:

10 Structures for
Teaching with Student-
Directed Inquiry

SCED647
Xuewen Wu
By Harvey "Smokey" Daniels
(Heinemann, 2017)
The main ideas of the book:
• Students will engage more
deeply in their learning if we
organize instruction around
their curiosities and interests.
• This book shows us how to do
just that by presenting 10
structures to help gradually
introduce student- driven
inquiry.
 Discussion:
What is student-directed
inquiry?
 • Provide students with the maximum right
to voice and choice.
• Teachers and students plan together,
planning is based on the interests of the
What is child, rather than standards or tests.
• The teacher respects the curiosity of the
students- students and starts with the elements of
interest to the students in the prescribed
directed units and topics.
• Start small and develop students' inquiry
inquiry? ability through a lot of practice.
• This approach emphasizes collaboration,
empathy, and authentic audiences with
authentic assessment.
Chapter 1
Demonstrate Your
Own Curiosity
• Daniels models how teachers
might do this by sharing his own
list of real-life questions. He does
this by creating a two-column
chart to share his self questions
in one column – his personal and
local wonderings – and his world
questions in the other –
wonderings about wider issues
that others might also wonder
about.
 Share your out-of-school life

Instructional Talk about your reading

methods in
Chapter 1 Show how you take a risk

Demonstrate inquiry as a faculty

team
Chapter3 Capture
and Honor Kids’
Questions
Honoring students’ questions may take many different forms in
different classrooms, but in general it means that we:
• regularly solicit kids’ wonders
• are open to students’ questions
• model our own wonderings
• allow ourselves and our classes to be interrupted by kids’
questions
• reserve a space for kids’ questions and regularly return to
them
• provide time for students to pursue answers to these
questions
Instructional methods
in chapter 3
• Set up and maintain a wonder wall
students post their questions with sticky notes on the
wall throughout the week whenever questions pop up –
during independent reading, at the end of a lesson,
whenever.
• Use idea notebooks
the first half of the notebook is used for writing ideas
and drafts and the second is for more general questions
and wonderings.
• Ignite community curiosity
A wonder wall was placed outside of each classroom
that families visited with a title that read, “What do you
want to learn in ____ grade this year?” With the markers
and sticky notes provided, students and their parents
could write and post their curious questions.
Questions
• How you can find the time to
follow student-driven inquiries
and still meet all curricular
requirements?
Chapter 5 Check
Our News Feed
Set up a news ticker
The teacher builds a model for students
how to access the website and find articles,
and then sets aside a fixed time for children
to explore the news.

Make sure that the students are looking for

topics suitable for the school and reading
at the correct reading level.

Students record and share new learning

content and any unresolved problems. This
not only stimulates the curiosity of the
students, but also helps them develop the
habit of reading regularly and critically
thinking about the news.
Follow a webcam
• There are a number of interesting
webcams that can fuel students’
curiosity.
• Students observe and record a
phenomenon through a webcam.
Students only need to write
observation notes every day.
Chapter 7 Pursue
Kids’ Own Questions
with Mini-Inquiries
Instructional methods in chapter 7
Design process
(1) Schedule a genius hour
Teacher models his/her own
Schedule one hour a week for genius hours questions
students to investigate their
problems. Kids keep curiosity lists in
journals
Reading students ’questions
aloud in the classroom can Use a curiosity chart and
verify students’ ideas, provide question boxes
students with ideas, and help Coming to genius hour
form problem groups when
students have similar questions.
(2) Run a Recurring Inquiry Project
• “Travel Tuesdays.” At the beginning of
the year each student writes down the
name of the place she most wants to
visit in the world. These papers are
folded and put into a jar. Then each
Tuesday, one paper is drawn from the
jar and the class conducts a group
inquiry into that location. Students
must synthesize what they’ve learned
and post the most important points on
the Padlet.
Chapter 8 Address
Curricular Units with
Mini-Inquiries
Instructional methods in chapter 8
• Provoke students’ interest with your own
story
Integrate life into teaching.
• Use students’ own questions to set up a
curricular topic
The teacher collects student questions at the
beginning of each unit and uses these
questions to guide learning. The teacher
brings the students together, brainstorms
the questions raised by the upcoming unit,
and provides time for the children to discuss,
so that they can elaborate on these
questions and then post them to everyone.