Keep the magic alive Katie Krais, Managing Director of JK Educate

Discovery drives learning, says Katie Krais, Managing Director of JK Educate, so educators must do all they can to keep that spark of curiosity going

Discovery is a key factor in lifelong learning and exploring the world in which we live. Curiosity and a love of learning are prerequisites for a child to be motivated to learn more, and to explore their world and succeed in it. But discovery also involves children learning about themselves, their interests and passions, and their strengths and weaknesses. It is the opposite of rote learning, and often involves the child developing their own questions and seeking the answers to them.

Born to learn Discovery is all about creating the love of learning. Most children are born with in-built curiosity; this is the spark that makes them want to discover. Both educators and parents need to recognise how to keep that spark alive and keep that fire burning, as lifelong learning is built on lifelong curiosity and discovery.

Children are programmed to learn and to be curious. Play — from the earliest age — is all about experimentation and discovery. This starts with baby gyms, and the discovery that things move and make different sounds when you touch them. It continues with activities such as sandpit play, where children often spend hours filling a toy dumper truck with sand and then tipping it out again. This is discovery learning — observing how the truck moves through the sand and the tracks its wheels make, exploring how the truck’s tipping mechanism works and experiencing the way the sand itself feels, its weight and its movement. As we know, in Early Years, teachers gently guide multi-sensory play in an expert and low-key manner, to direct and maximise the discoveries young children make and keep the circle of curiosity alive so that children remain hungry to learn. The challenge is then to maintain this throughout the child’s education.

Self-discovery Self-discovery is a crucial part of both tuition and lifelong

learning. Tutors and teachers provide a reflective support to individual students, acting both as a guide for discovery, and as a mirror to reflect and give feedback on the child’s strengths and weaknesses. One-to-one teaching time facilitates a unique pathway to learning, as teachers work to enhance curiosity by building a circle of discovery and heightening motivation to learn.

A positive, supportive learning experience can dramatically boost a child’s learning, when teachers and tutors gently help students understand their own strengths and weaknesses and identify what drives their desire to learn. This knowledge can then be harnessed further by encouraging children to identify targets for themselves and work towards them. Curiosity and motivation are closely linked, however, so we need to protect the drive to discover by not being too critical or negative about mistakes children make. Instead, I have found it best to ask some open questions, such as, ‘What did you enjoy about working on this?’ or ‘What was hard about it?’ This can prompt a helpful and supportive discussion that helps children to evaluate their efforts and discover alternative approaches, as well as motivating them to improve their output for themselves.

Tapping into the child’s interests Working with a child’s interests gives you an insight into what they would most like to learn more about. It is these interests that give teachers a way to spark their curiosity. Many young children love animals, and are often fascinated by one type of animal such as horses — or snails! — while other children might be football crazy. Any of these passions can be used as a route to discovery.

One of my tutors was working with a seven-yearold boy, Theo, who was disengaged at school, showing little interest in his studies. His parents thought that bringing in a tutor might provide a breakthrough; the tutor asked his mother what Theo liked, and she told her that the only thing he was passionate about was football. This gave the tutor an angle of discovery for a wide range of subjects — for example, finding out the weight, size and shape of a sphere that happens to be a football, and identifying football-playing nations as way of introducing a new geography topic.

Relating their initial lessons to football gave Theo the impression that his tutor knew him and cared about what he liked, as well as making the lessons more interesting for him. And once his curiosity to learn was ignited, he became much more engaged at school; he went on to achieve a place and thrive at a selective secondary school.

A discovery case study Tailoring learning to things that children are already interested in is just one way of making learning

bespoke — a key feature of one-to-one teaching and tutoring. Engaging children as individuals is the easy way in, to give them choices whilst encouraging learning and discovery. It benefits all students but is also a key principle of working with children with special needs.

Working as a SENCO with a group of dyslexic students in Key Stage 2, I successfully used a multi-sensory way of learning letters and sounds through exploring everyday objects in the students’ homes. I gave each student a shoe box, which became their ‘alphabet box’, to cover, paint and decorate how they wished with pictures and stickers, before asking them to search at home for items they found interesting that began with the sound ‘a’, and to bring those objects into class. This checked the students’ sightsound knowledge of the letter ‘a’ and allowed them to have fun discovering this at home. They enjoyed the process of discovery and exploration, whilst steadily building their sight-sound letter recognition as they found objects for each letter of the alphabet in turn, week by week.

The children had autonomy in choosing which objects to bring to class and then in selecting one item to keep in the box for each letter, recording it against the correct letter on the box lid. The learning games continued once the alphabet boxes were filled; for example, I might ask the children to quickly find the object in their box that started with the sound ‘ssss’. Another game involved asking the children to close their eyes and choose an item from their box by touch alone, and then open their eyes and identify the sound and letter with which the item’s name began, from plastic letters of the alphabet laid out on the table in an arch.

This case study illustrates just how well multi-sensory discovery can work. Through the discovery element of this project, the children were highly motivated to find objects beginning with a particular sound and letter; matching their chosen objects with their beginning sounds, and the repetition built into the classroom games, quickly consolidated their understanding and knowledge without the children feeling any negative pressure.

A lifetime of learning Guided learning should be at the heart of fulfilling a child’s curiosity. We can enable and harness their motivation to be both curious and productive by focusing on their interests, and by making learning bespoke and fun. Parents and educators alike have a role to play in this and can set the scene for learning through discovery to take place, especially in one-toone interactions.

We can all help children flourish by recognising the excitement and joy of discovering and fulfilling the hunger to learn and succeed. When children learn to love discovery, they are launched into a lifetime of learning.

That’s when the magic starts to happen. n