10 strategies and 3 policies for creating Wonderfull-learning
Conijn J. M., Rietdijk, W., Broekhof, E., Andre, L., & Schinkel, A. (2022). A theoretical framework and questionnaire for wonder-full education. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 54(3), 423–444. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2021.1942992
Would you consider adding "student experience wonder" to your learning outcomes list? And if so, then what teaching strategies will you use to help students achieve it? Do your organization's policies support wonder-full education? Conijn and colleagues (2022) suggested eight strategies and even three policies for designing and supporting wonder-full education.
I attribute wonder-full education to experience-based learning. In this style of learning, the foundation is the atmosphere and environment. That is, the most important thing is to create a trusting atmosphere and enriched environment so that students can share their experience of wonder and trust the teacher as a "guide" to this world of wonder.
Have you ever experienced wonder? How was it? Do you remember the colours, smells, sounds and other feelings that surrounded you during this experience? I'm not just asking :) Sharing your miracle experience with students is one of the strategies.
Wonder as a learning outcome: The students will be able to experience wonder "is to perceive something as strange or beyond current comprehension" (Conijn et al., 2022, p. 423). Wonder s a mix of surprise, the importance of what one is contemplating, and the awareness that one's knowledge is incomplete.
I liked most that, according to the authors, wonder does not disappear with a sense of understanding, unlike curiosity. Even if you understand the physical processes behind the rainbow, you will not stop wondering about it. It looks like wondering is a "perpetual motion machine" for learning.
The authors suggest 8 teachers' strategies that may foster students' wonder. Important that they are originally designed for pupils. As the student is on the other side of the teacher's strategy, I imagined and added the students to these teachers' strategies!The authors suggest 8 teachers' strategies that may foster students' wonder. Important that they are originally designed for pupils. As the student is on the other side of the teacher's strategy, I imagined and added to these teachers' strategies the students!
EnviroNment and atmosphere
1. Creating enriched environment to inspire students and provide opportunities for exploration and discovery.
I suggest starting thinking about your program from the perspective of the first strategy "Creating Enriched environment".
For example, consider whether you can make a permanently enriched environment, like having classes in different spaces — outdoors, museums, metaverse (imagine teaching in Roblox.
Or consider what you can add to your current environment without changing it.. For example,
interacTIONS directed to achieving wonder:
Creating enriched environment
to inspire students and provide opportunities for exploration and discovery.
Exploration and experimentation
Explore and experiment by creating conditions for exploration, theory-building, hypothesis testing, and reflection.
Meaning making
Guide students to construct their own meanings and understandings about different concepts and phenomena.
Teacher sensitivity
Be sensitive to children's personal wonder experience.
Teacher as a role model
Display and share your personal wonder experiences and fascinations
Stimulate imagination
Stimulate the students' imagination, for example, by making narrative-based lesson structure and asking student's for creating stories.
Defamiliarising the familiar
Guide children to find the strange, mysterious, and wonderful in the everyday.
Encourage contemplation
Encourage attentive awareness, sensory rather than cognitive, to what presents itself in the moment, in the outer as well as the inner world.
POLICIES for supporting wonder-full learning
Less focus on test and method centred education
Stimulates / allows teachers to take time during lessons for students' interests, as well as for their own, which may lead student's to discover new interests.
Enriched education
Offer an enriched environment.
"if a school wants to promote wonder in children, there should be time for 'aimless' exploration"
Child-focused education
Stimulate students to be curious and inquisitive, to engage all their senses, to make a personal connection with the subject matter and to discover their own specific interests.
Wonder-full vs Weird
What seems like wonder to one may seem strange to another… It is essential to protect all training participants by explaining in advance that experiencing a miracle is a unique and often individual experience. And that even if you don't understand the experience of another, be respectful because all people are different.
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