Putting a Little Mystery into Teaching

Principal Leadership

We all look to teachers to tell us things we don't know, right? Yes, but just giving students information does little to engage them. A better route, write Bryan Goodwin, McREL's vice president of communications & marketing, and John Ristvey, principal consultant, is to "build suspense [around a topic], piquing students’ natural curiosity." They cite example science and mathematics lessons McREL has created for NASA on comets and meteorites, one of which has students reach into a box and feel a variety of materials—dirt, dust, ice, a potato—that represent the materials in a comet. Students then record their observations and speculations about the composition of a comet. Exploration and solving mysteries is not just a "gimmicky way to increase the entertainment value of a lesson," Goodwin and Ristvey write, but a way to tap into a human's natural "desire to explore and learn about their environments."

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