Curiosity in the Classroom
A curiosity-rich classroom is a classroom where students — and teachers — thrive.
Cultivating curiosity in the classroom, for students and ourselves, can often feel secondary to aligning with curricular standards and meeting performance goals. But research shows that curiosity is not second fiddle to learning — it is learning. Below you’ll find an array of strategies, activities, and programming that will support you in sparking curiosity in the year ahead.
Join Inspired Teaching in making 2025 a year full of curiosity.
Sign up for the Curiosity Challenge today! Each month, Inspired Teaching will share exclusive interviews, prompts, and tools to support exploring and understanding new things about yourself, your community, and the wider world.
Begin Each Week with Curiosity
Hooray For Monday is Inspired Teaching‘s weekly collection of actionable insights, expert advice, and practical resources for teachers, school leaders, parents, and all adults who want every classroom to be filled with enthusiasm and excitement for learning. These issues have been curated to highlight content that focuses specifically on curiosity, but you can find curiosity infused into every Hooray For Monday!
Professional Development to Cultivate Curiosity
Inspired Teaching Institutes are FREE, improvisation-based professional development for teachers and school leaders. They move participants beyond passive professional learning: Inspired Teaching teaches the way people learn best – with our whole selves. Join us online or in person each month.
Understanding how we are feeling and why we are feeling that way is essential to our well-being but this is something we learn, not something we automatically know. Our students come to us with many different levels of self-awareness depending on their prior experiences. Do they know how to read facial expressions? Can they articulate how a feeling relates to an action? Do they show empathy toward others? Can they express how they are feeling? In this webinar, we will discuss how to build these skills in the classroom and the many positive implications of doing so including better academic performance, stronger classroom communities, and fewer behavioral problems.
The Teaching with Improvisation Fellowship is an annual invigorating, yearlong learning experience for teachers at schools in Washington, DC, grounded in the art of improvisation and the 5 Core Elements that lead to an engagement-rich classroom.
Application to the Teaching with Improvisation Fellowship is open to educators at all DMV schools– public, public charter, and independent — and are reviewed on a first-come, first-served basis. Applications for the 2025-2026 cohort are now open! Learn more at the button.
Inspire Curiosity
All of Inspired Teaching’s lessons and activities are rooted in the Inspired Teaching Approach and designed to help educators build their practice as Inspired Teachers, cultivating curiosity in their classrooms and themselves. The ready-to-use and adaptable lessons and activities below are great places to get started!
