Making a Space for Curiosity and Creativity: Classroom-Library Collaboration for Inquiry Learning

A number of thought-leaders in education loudly proclaim that the system of schooling in the U.S. and around the world is robbing students of their innate curiosity. For example, in his book The One World School House: Education Reimagined, Salman Khan, founder of The Khan Academy, notes that the old classroom model is “a fundamentally passive way of learning, while the world requires more and more active processing of information” (Khan 2013, 1). Khan’s vision for a “free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere” involves capitalizing on new technologies and improving the quality of student-educator and peer-to-peer interactions. Sir Ken Robinson in his TED Talk “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” makes a case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity rather than undermining it. Robinson proposes that educators rethink their conception of the “richness of human capacity” and “cultivate the diversity of human intelligence” to develop the whole person, not just the math and language parts of the brain.

Robinson and Khan seem to agree that the majority of schools today are not making spaces for students to develop curiosity and creativity. Students need to have their diverse interests and talents recognized. Schooling should help them build upon their creativity and celebrate what is unique about every individual. Learners need to be challenged; they must master skills and develop dispositions that can support them in taking risks and innovating.

How can school librarians help change the perception and the reality that these thought leaders share widely? School librarians have the potential to influence how teachers teach and students learn. School librarians are experienced in helping students interact with information. When librarians support learners in accessing diverse resources in multiple formats, students are positioned to take an active role in learning. When students are invited to explore the wider world of information beyond the novel or textbook, they can become curious, make connections, draw inferences that deepen their understanding, and interpret the content of their learning in new, creative, and innovative ways. School librarians can co-teach using an inquiry learning model.

Curiosity and Motivation

Brian Grazer is a Hollywood movie producer of award-winning films such as A Beautiful Mind and Apollo 13. Along with co-author Charles Fishman, Grazer wrote a book called A Curious Mind: How to Live a Bigger Life (2015). While reading their book, I continuously made many connections to inquiry learning. For example, they write: “Curiosity starts out as an impulse, an urge, but it pops out into the world as something more active, more searching: a question” (10) and “curiosity is the tool that sparks creativity. Curiosity is the technique that gets to innovation” (62).

Along with open-mindedness, self- reliance, and perseverance, curiosity is among the dispositions identified by Jean Donham (2014) in her study of undergraduate students’ readiness for college-level research. Inquiry learning has the potential to spark students’ curiosity because educators design learning experiences that relate to students’ interests. Curiosity motivates people; it helps them persevere when the process is not easy. Inquiry learning requires that students take ownership of the learning process and become more self-reliant in terms of motivation and decision-making. Inquiry learning has the potential to result in deep learning for students who have invested their whole hearts, minds, and bodies in pursuing a personally meaningful question.

Critical Stages in Inquiry Learning

In her research, Carol Kuhlthau (1985) studied the information search process (ISP) from the perspective of the learner. She looked at the feelings, thoughts, and actions that come into play during six stages of the ISP: initiation, selection, exploration, formulation, collection, and presentation. She learned that without “exploring and formulating a focus that identifies a clear question to pursue, students get mired in the collection stage of research and end up merely reporting on disconnected facts” (Maniotes and Kuhlthau 2014, 10). Kuhlthau also learned that students need guidance along the way in order to negotiate the complexity of the ISP.

The six stages of the ISP informed the basis for the Guided Inquiry Design® process (Kuhlthau, Maniotes, and Caspari 2012), which comprises eight phases: open, immerse, explore, identify, gather, create, share, and evaluate. The traditional research process is embedded in the Guided Inquiry Design® during the explore, identify, and gather phases. While school librarians can help foster student success in these three research phases, there are many benefits for students, classroom teachers, and school librarians if librarians co-teach throughout. From open to evaluate, librarians can help spark students’ curiosity and design inquiry so that students have choice in how they demonstrate their new knowledge. Choice and a voice will ensure learners are invested in the process and products of their learning.

Launching Inquiry Learning

Open, phase one of the Guided Inquiry Design® process, requires educators to make connections between required curriculum standards and students’ interests. In this phase, educators pique students’ curiosity. They present a problem or dilemma—a big idea—around which educators and students can build essential questions. Educators who connect this opening to students’ lives will find them more motivated and engaged in the inquiry process. Educators can create conditions in which students want to explore, want to know, want to question, and want to act.

The open phase relates directly to instructional design. Effective lessons begin by motivating learners to actively engage. With two (or more) educators brainstorming ideas, the essential question(s) they co-develop to frame the process may be more open-ended to invite learners to pursue divergent lines of inquiry. Collaborating educators can co-develop more creative ways to launch an inquiry process. They might present a problem with a skit between two actors or may present a dilemma in the form of a discussion or debate between two opposing views. Working together on unit design, they may improve their ability to pique students’ curiosity, spark their creativity, and keep them motivated throughout the process.

Demonstrations of Learning Outcomes

School librarians who advocate for student choice during inquiry learning will want to support classroom teachers in co-developing assignments that allow for a diversity of final products. As Daniel Pink, who studies human motivation, proclaims: “If schools truly want to engage students, they need to downgrade control and compliance—and upgrade autonomy” (Azzam 2014, 12). When students are encouraged to pursue personally meaningful questions and demonstrate their learning through any variety of means—using technology tools, building a model, choreographing a dance, writing a script and performing their work, giving a speech, or even writing a report—their motivation to persist through to the end of the inquiry process may be much stronger.

Helping classroom teachers think about what “counts” in terms of learning outcomes can be a way that school librarians advocate for students’ diverse expressions of their intelligence and new knowledge. When school librarians co-develop assignments and assessment measures, they can influence their colleagues and school learning communities in terms of measuring a diversity of outcomes that meet educators’ student learning objectives. School librarians can share the added challenge of designing appropriate assessments that relate to both the inquiry process as well as to the students’ final products; they can co-assess students’ learning outcomes to help ensure that students’ unique interpretations of information are honored. They can help students and educators understand that when students produce a variety of final products, the creating and sharing phases of the inquiry process is far richer for all learners.

The School Librarian’s Co-Planning and Co-Teaching Roles

In their study of 289 Ohio high school seniors, Cindy Kovalik, Susan Yutzey, and Laura Piazza (2012) found that although students need assistance during the research process, they rarely asked school librarians for help. These researchers also found that students rely on the assignment requirements, guidelines, and rubrics to guide their process. “Collaboration between teachers and school librarians when creating projects may lead to a better understanding of how librarians can help in the research process” (Kovalik, Yutzey, and Piazza 2012, 17–18).

Today’s youth will use information and conduct print and online research in their schooling, in their work and everyday lives, and, hopefully, to participate as active citizens in local, national, and global communities. School librarians who are experts at modeling and teaching the information literacy skills that students use during the research process can do even more than help learners find and use information. School librarians can co-design, co-teach, and co-assess with classroom teachers inquiry-based units of instruction that begin by activating learners’ curiosity and motivating them to take ownership of their own learning process. They can encourage students to ask personally meaningful questions and share their learning in unique and creative ways.

Works Cited

Azzam, Amy M. “Motivated to Learn: A Conversation with Daniel Pink.” Educational Leadership 72 no. 1 (September 2014): 12-17.

Donham, Jean. “College Ready—What Can We Learn from First-Year College Assignments? An Examination of Assignments at Iowa Colleges and Universities.” School Library Research 17 (2014): 1-21.

Grazer, Brian, and Charles Fishman. A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life. Simon & Schuster, 2015.

Khan, Salman. One World School House: Education Reimagined. Twelve, 2012.

Kovalik, Cindy, Susan Yutzey, and Laura Piazza. “Information Literacy and High School Seniors: Perceptions of the Research Process.” School Library Research 16 (2013): 1-26.

Kuhlthau, Carol C. “A Process Approach to Library Skills Instruction.” School Library Research Quarterly 3 no. 1 (1985): 35-40.

Kuhlthau, Carol C., Leslie K. Maniotes, and Ann K. Caspari. Guided Inquiry Design®: A Framework for Your School. Libraries Unlimited, 2012.

Maniotes, Leslie K., and Carol C. Kuhlthau. “Making the Shift from Traditional Research Assignments to Guided Inquiry Learning.” Knowledge Quest 43 no. 2 (November/December 2014): 8-17.

Robinson, Sir Ken. “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” TED Talk. February, 2006. https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity