Ep #48: Create a Culture of Learning in Your Home or Classroom

Welcome to the Raising Healthy Kid Brains podcast where moms and teachers come to learn all about kids’ brains, how they work, how they learn, how they grow and simple tips and tricks for raising the most resilient, kind, smart, compassionate kids we can. All while having lots of grace and compassion for ourselves because you know what? We all really need and deserve that too. I am your host, Amy Nielson. Let’s get ready to start the show.

Hey there friends. I am so excited about our topic today. This is something I’m so passionate about because we’re going to be talking about creating a culture of learning either in your home or in your classroom with kids that you work with. And what’s really cool about it is that it actually impacts you and the other adults and older people in your home as well. And it’s so amazing because our brains love to learn new things and they can keep learning and learning and learning as we continue to grow.

Now, learning can be so organic and so just natural and beautiful and wonderful when you create it as part of your culture in your home or in your classroom. And so I want to talk about what that can look like. And today we’re going to talk about what I call the organic learning method. It’s a three-step method. And we’re going to talk about that. So let’s get started with step one.

And step one in the organic learning method is exposure. Kids are naturally getting exposure to so many new things, new words, new activities, new places, all of those things. And it’s important for us to give kids exposure. Sometimes we do that through books. Sometimes we do that through new ideas, new experiences, all those kinds of things. Now, there’s a couple of different pieces that we’re working on here. One thing is that scientists have learned that questions are contagious.

And so what happens is, is that kids that ask the most questions are kids that get asked the most questions. It’s contagious. How cool is that? So if you want your kids to ask really good questions, ask them more questions. So when they get home, you ask them questions about what happened. But get specific and detailed and just ask good questions. Also the quality of questions that we ask is really important. We’re teaching children not only to ask questions, but how to know which questions to ask, which is of course, one of the most important things that scientists can learn, that mathematicians can learn.

You have to learn what the right questions are in addition to being able to just ask questions. So questions are contagious. Ask your kids good questions often while you’re reading, around the dinner table, while you’re driving in the car because that’s such a good time to get some one-on-one chatting with them. And what’s happening as kids are learning, as we’re creating this database of basic knowledge in their brains.

And then what happens is, is, yeah, we only have a couple of those things in the front of our brains at a time that we’re using. But the rest of it is kind of back in the back in the warehouse kind of mixing and knocking up against each other. And the more we can put back there, the more new creative combinations they can make. And that’s where new creative ideas come from. So with my kids, I’m always talking about, “Let’s put some stuff back there in your database and let it kind of do some hanging out back there.” And it’s really, really fun. And that’s when new creative, awesome ideas come out.

Now, as we’re going through exposure, this idea, this step of exposure, what we’re trying to do is create an awareness of ignorance. And I learned about this idea in this amazing book called Curious by Ian Leslie. And this book is amazing and I hope you’ll check it out. It’s fantastic. He talks about the curiosity zone. And he says when we don’t know anything, it’s really hard to engage our brains about something. We don’t know enough to know that we should know more about something. So there’s just no curiosity about something you know absolutely nothing about.

If you’ve ever gotten into a conversation with someone who’s just super excited about computer programming or really, really, really excited about, my kid, really, really excited about Minecraft. And I’ve never played, really Minecraft. I think I did one time and made me kind of nauseous. So it’s not my favorite thing, but he loves it. And he’ll talk all day about it and I’m not maybe super curious. I’m curious because my son cares, but I’m not actually really curious about Minecraft because I don’t know very much about it. And I don’t care a whole lot about Minecraft in particular. So there’s not a lot of curiosity there.

Now, on the other end, sometimes when we know too much about a topic, we kind of get bored and we’re unlikely to be interested in getting more information. So if we think we already know everything, imagine if you go to a conference and you have three classes to choose from. And there’s a class on a topic that is a word that you’ve never heard of and know nothing about. How likely are you going to want to go to that class? You’ll be like, “I don’t know what that is. I’m not that curious.”

And then there’s a class that’s how to say the sounds of the alphabet and you’re like, “I feel like I know that one already. I feel like I’ve got that.” And so you might not be that interested in that because you feel like you already know everything there is to know about how to make the alphabet sounds in English. But then there’s another class that’s really fun and fascinating. That’s the one you’re going to do. You know a little bit about it but you know that you don’t know everything about it and so you’re curious.

So this is called the curiosity zone, it’s kind of like a bell curve. And we want things where we know enough to know that we don’t know everything, but we don’t necessarily know everything about it yet. So that’s our job and exposure, and exposure is so fun. It’s so fun to help kids find new ideas and just get curious about it. And that’s where we get to step two in the organic learning process.

We’re now at curiosity. We have discovered a knowledge gap. There is something we know just enough about that we’re so interested in it. And we don’t know all the things about it yet to be bored. So we are so curious and we want to know what’s happening. And we’re going to talk about a specific type of curiosity called diversive curiosity. And this is where the hunt for knowledge begins. And it’s kind of the fun, wild, impulsive, irresistible, kind of just wanting to know about all the things. It’s a little bit unruly. It’s a little unplanned. It might be a little deviant.

There’s no specific process or method here, we’re just curious and it’s so fun and awesome. And it’s easily satisfied and it burns out really quickly. So it’s important we really need to be able to go into diversive curiosity because it’s kind of where this all begins. But we also need to be able to get past just starting at diversive curiosity. There’s a lot of talk about attention span and how much it’s changed since the 50s. I think I read something where in the 50s it was 30 seconds or something was the normal attention span or something for, I don’t know if it was videos or something. I can’t remember exactly what this was.

But then we get to the 2020s and we’re about two seconds, it’s just changed a lot because of technology and everything we have going on. So that’s a little bit exemplary of what this diversive curiosity is, it’s just so short and fast and quick. So our goal is then to take kids from this amazing diversive curiosity, which is really, really healthy, but also not where we want to stay. And we want to get them into the next part, which is the step I call exploration. And in exploration we’re getting into something called epistemic curiosity. I kind of like to think of epistemic curiosity as diversive curiosity, that’s all grown up.

We’re able to kind of harness a little bit of that diversive curiosity and channel it and kind of direct it and give it some sustained effort. And we hear all about grit and kind of being able to put some effort back into something, back into something, back into something. I kind of think, yeah, we’re taking all of some of that energy and awesomeness and we’re adding in some direction and some sustained effort.

There is this cool quote by a man named John Lloyd and he says, “The closer you look at anything, the more interesting it gets.” And I think that can be so true sometimes. I get to, as part of my work, as part of education, as part of a business owner, I get to travel around the country and sometimes around the world to attend amazing conferences. And I recently heard about a conference that I want to go to so bad, it sounds so amazing. It’s in London and it’s called The Boring Conference. And I was instantly curious because what a catchy title.

So The Boring Conference, you go and the idea is, is that all the speakers come up with an idea that just feels ridiculously boring. And then they go really, really deep on it. So for example, a survey of the ties in a man’s closet and the colors. And going very, very deep into that and the psychology of what that might mean. Or studying all the different types of cash registers and how they work and why that’s fascinating. And I’ve got to tell you, I want to go to this conference so bad because I love nerding out about stuff like that and just really looking at something so deeply that you just get so interested in it. It’s just so fascinating.

So here’s this idea with exploration, where we’re growing up that diversive curiosity. We’re giving it time. We’re giving it effort. We’re giving it direction. We’re going to go deeper. We’re going to go wider. Now, here is what’s really, really cool is that I think that we as the adults have such an opportunity to create this culture of curiosity, this culture of organic learning, both by giving exposure and encouraging curiosity, helping children notice, asking the right questions, to notice those knowledge gaps, helping them figure that out.

My kids will come up and ask me a question and I used to, I don’t know, for some reason, feel like I was supposed to know everything because I’m the mom. Well, I’m going to Google that really quick. But it turns out, that’s not actually really good for encouraging curiosity, because it actually kills curiosity right away.

There’s this idea that Ian Leslie talks about in his book Curious, and he talks about turning puzzles into mysteries. He talks about when we solve puzzles, you get out a puzzle and you solve a puzzle, and then you’re done and the puzzle’s done. And then you’re not curious about this puzzle, you’ve finished it, it’s over, the end, curiosity killed. And so we said, “What if we didn’t turn everything into puzzles?”

So kids come up and ask us these questions like, how do bees fly? And we’re like, “Well, they have wings”, whatever. Something, we go look it up, we Google whatever the answer is to their question and we just kind of answer it, point blank, here’s the end. And then it’s over, their curiosity is done. What if instead, we could turn it into a mystery and be like, “I wonder. Their body’s kind of a lot bigger than their wings. Their wings are so small. Is there structure in their wings to help hold up their wings?” And just kind of talk and think about and turn it into kind of this mystery.

And mysteries are so fun because they keep going. They don’t just end, you have to keep going deeper. Well, are wings of birds similar to wings of bees? And what about other things, ducks have wings, do they fly very much? Yeah, they do. Are there things with wings that don’t fly? What about airplanes? Airplanes’ wings don’t flap up and down. And then you’re just going on and on and on thinking about wings and flying and all these things. And you turned this whole thing into this mystery.

And you can talk about it forever and keep digging and going deeper and wider and deeper and wider and deeper and wider instead of it just being because they have wings and then it’s over. So this is so cool. And we impact this so much by the culture we create. So two things that I’m going to recommend.

So number one, create an environment of asking questions and allowing to have exposure and helping kids start to recognize their knowledge gaps, pointing them out not as a flaw, but as an opportunity. Oh, my goodness, we don’t know about this thing yet. How cool. Well, let’s go learn it. Let’s go figure it out. And when you have that excitement and that kind of attitude towards discovering new things, it’s contagious. They love it. They want to ask questions too, and they’re excited too because you are and they’re like, “Oh, my goodness, this must be amazing.”

So we want to do that, create experiences, create exposure, help kids recognize those knowledge gaps so that they’re curious. And then we kind of want to help them also channel that diversive curiosity into epistemic curiosity, help them go deep and wide. Don’t just answer the question. Don’t just solve the puzzle for them, but come up with more questions, good ones that keep turning all of those puzzles, the one question they asked you into this deep long mystery that keeps going and going and going. And they can keep asking more and more questions and go deeper and wider and more curious.

And in case you haven’t figured it out yet, here’s why this matters. So there’s a feedback loop between curiosity and knowledge. And here’s why this matters. They did a study, and the best predictor, they did a study of 2700 six year olds over a decade. And what they discovered was that the best predictor of future academic success was not emotional intelligence. It wasn’t fine motor function. It wasn’t self-control or motivation. Guess what it was? It wasn’t even IQ, you guys.

The best predictor of future academic success in six year olds was their general knowledge that they already had at six, you guys. Because there’s something called the Matthew effect where what you have begins to multiply early and it multiplies and multiplies and multiplies kind of like interest. And so the earlier we can get knowledge into these kiddos’ brains, the longer that knowledge, it has to gain interest. The longer that knowledge has to grow. And the studies are showing that.

So what do we do? We want to help them develop more curiosity because when they develop more curiosity, they gain more knowledge. And when they have more knowledge, guess what happens? They recognize more knowledge gaps because they learn just enough about something to know that they have a gap with something else. You know how you get older and you used to think that you knew everything when you were a teenager. And then you get older and you realize how much you didn’t know. And then you get older and older and you really didn’t even know even more. The older we get, the more we recognize we don’t know.

It’s because we’re discovering knowledge gaps. We meet more people. We see more cultures. We get to learn more about other languages. We read more books, whatever. And we’re discovering more knowledge gaps. So this happens in kids too, at a different level. So the more curiosity we help them discover and channel, the more knowledge they get, which helps them discover more knowledge gaps, which makes them curious again, which makes them gain more knowledge. And it’s this loop which is so powerful because we’re helping them build that knowledge that’s going to be the best predictor of future success for our kiddos.

Okay, that is what I have for you today. I hope you found it fascinating. I certainly did. And I hope you’ll take something from that and just figure out maybe one thing you want to do to create, just one thing you work on even this week, can be a small thing because small things, we’re much more likely to get done, so choose a small thing. And implement it and try to maybe just increase a little bit the culture of curiosity, the culture of organic learning that you’re creating either in your home or your classroom.

If you want to tell us what it is that you’re going to do, then we’ll be your accountability buddies. Head on over to Instagram, planningplaytime.com or you can find us on Facebook as well. You can send us an email if you want amy@planningplaytime.com. Let us know what it is you’re going to do. And we’ll be your accountability buddy for it and you can try it out. And then we’d love to hear how it goes. You are amazing. Have a fabulous rest of your day and I’ll catch you right here on the podcast next week.

Don’t you just love all the fun things we’re learning on the show together? Well, we wanted to give you a chance to practice a little bit of it at home. And so we made you a special freebie just for being a listener here and you can grab it at planningplaytime.com\special-freebie. That is planningplaytime.com\special-freebie. So what this freebie is, I’ll tell you, is an amazing alphabet activity that you can start using with your kiddos and it is based in play and is so fun.

You can use dot markers with it, you can use Q-tip painting, you could use circle cereal. There’s all kinds of options, but you can print it out today and get started. Just head over to planningplaytime.com\special-freebie and we’ll send that to you right away.

Thank you for hanging out with me today for this fun chat on Raising Healthy Kid Brains. If you want to see more of what we’re doing to support kiddos and their amazing brains, come visit us on our website planningplaytime.com. See you next week.