The question of how to get students to think deeply is not new. Teachers in the classical tradition have been wrestling with it for centuries, and point us toward practical strategies for any classroom. Hat tip to @MartinCothran My latest: garyhouchens.substack.com/p/…

A Berkeley history professor said he’s gone from assigning 100 pages of reading per week to 35. Another “said the earliest version of the…course he taught required seven full books, while his most recent iteration exclusively consisted of excerpts.” “We are now reaching a crisis point where if the number (of pages) goes down further, it’s unclear to me whether my discipline of history can really be taught,” the first one said.

Color coded binder clips. Post it notes. Frixion erasable pens.

There are a couple of problems I see, or have seen, in gifted programs, speaking as a refugee of such places. 1.) Everybody and their mother thinks their children belong in the gifted program. Look, I get it. You like your kids. You love your kids. But let’s be honest: they’re not all that bright. (I’m not talking about Charlotte’s kids specifically, but mothers in general.) Just because little Susie can memorize certain things fairly easily, sits quietly, and doesn’t make a fuss in the classroom doesn’t mean she’s gifted. 2.) Gifted kids are not homogeneous in terms of their abilities, skills, or accumulated knowledge. I was bumped from 3rd grade to 4th grade when I was a kid. The problem was that I hadn’t learned long division yet because I simply hadn’t been taught it. I was still working on multiplication. To this day, I still don’t know my multiplication tables by rote memorization. Instead, I basically do the math in real time in my head. To an outside observer it appears almost instantaneous, but there are still entire chunks of the multiplication table I don’t know from memory. Also, there are different kinds and varying degrees of talent and giftedness in children, which makes things complicated. You have to tailor education to the individual child. When you don’t, the child often becomes frustrated and eventually gives up on the entire process, which is pretty much what happened to me eventually in seventh grade.

It’s quite confusing to me that characteristics such as curiosity, wonder, and inquiry are not commonly associated with explicit instruction. Having now used explicit instruction with two groups of seventh graders, I’ve found that it actually promotes far more curiosity and wonder than instruction without it. Why? As students gain knowledge and connect it to existing knowledge in long-term memory, their schemas become richer and more interconnected. This naturally and organically leads them to ask more questions and demonstrate greater curiosity and interest in what they are learning. I believe this is the most effective way to foster inquiry and curiosity in the classroom and not by trying to force it through obscure phenomena or attention-grabbing stimuli that may produce a temporary sense of curiosity, but quickly fade because students lack the knowledge needed to sustain meaningful inquiry into the phenomenon. Teach students concepts in small, manageable steps. Allow their working memory to effectively process new information and encode it into long-term memory. Have them frequently retrieve that knowledge over time, and provide opportunities to apply it in different contexts and settings so it becomes meaningful and transferable. As their knowledge grows, curiosity follows. They begin to wonder, ask questions, and inquire naturally and organically. In some ways, this resembles the Dunning–Kruger effect. As students learn more, they become increasingly aware of the vastness of what they do not yet know. Rather than diminishing curiosity, greater knowledge often fuels it.