I’ve got to admit that it’s been a tough week.

If you are a full time classroom teacher, you know those happen from time to time. They are the weeks when it is the hardest to feel inspired or motivated — and when it is the hardest to believe that your work is actually making a difference.

As a result, I wasn’t sure if I had anything to share with you today.

Then, Evan ran into my room long after the day ended.

“Mr. Ferriter!” he said, “I forgot that I had something to show you.”

After rummaging around in his backpack for a few minutes, he pulled out what could only be described as a “well loved” spiral notebook. Its cover was tattered. The spirals were pushed over on themselves. I couldn’t quite see what it was about that notebook that made Evan come back long after school ended to show it to me.

“This was my sister’s,” he said. “She started keeping it when she was in your class!”

When I opened it up and read the inscription on the inside cover, I got those geeky teacher chill bumps that we get every time that we know we’ve made a difference in the life of a child.

Eliza’s inscription refers to something that I really believe in: We need to give kids just as many chances to ASK good questions as we give them to ANSWER our questions.

And that work happens all the time in my classroom. I regularly stop my lesson and say things like, “Curious people rule the world — so what are you wondering about RIGHT NOW. Share that thinking with a side partner.”

I also give students plenty of time to answer their own wonder questions in class. In fact, it is the primary “turn-to” task that kids tackle whenever they finish their work early and are looking for something to do.

Generally, I don’t score wonder questions — I want students to realize that the reward for writing them is the feeling we get whenever we let our minds wander and wonder. But I will use wonder questions as grade replacements for students who are trying to raise a mark as long as the questions they are trying to answer are connected to the concepts that we are studying in our classroom.

But what I find is that grades or not, most students are motivated by the opportunity to ask and answer their own questions.

Need proof?

Check out just the FIRST PAGE of Eliza’s long-held wonder journal:

What does this all mean for teacher who are interested in building confident learners?

Being a confident learner begins and ends with recognizing the topics that we want to learn more about and knowing how to take active steps towards finding answers to our OWN questions.

Those are moments that are sometimes stripped away in traditional classrooms, where coverage of the curriculum takes priority as we “prepare students for the end of grade exams.”

Instead of giving kids chances to pursue their own interests, we present them with things that the state or county want them to be interested in. In doing so, we create STUDENTS — kids who can parrot back answers to questions that we ask — instead of LEARNERS — kids who ask and answer their own questions simply because learning something new is rewarding.

So I guess the real question worth asking as you start your new school year is, “How will you give the kids in your classroom chances to wonder and time to pursue the answers to their own questions?”

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