Tapping Into Curiosity to Engage Teens in Challenging Content

One of the tenets of The Greene School in West Greenwich, Rhode Island, is to make learning meaningful and relevant for their students. So while teachers certainly take state standards and content requirements into account, they also get to know their students well, in order to capture their curiosity as a means to develop knowledge and skills.

In a school devoted to environmental stewardship, many of the students have an interest in both climate issues and social justice. When first-year AP Statistics teacher James Bailey was tackling scatterplots, random samplings, and least squares regression lines, he used something the kids found compelling and cool as an entry point: the Tree Equity Score. “It shows the canopy or the coverage of trees in all the different blocks in the urban areas of the United States,” says Bailey. “There’s all different statistics that you can layer on top of it—like you can look at poverty, you can look at race, and you can look at all the different things that a general census would collect.”

Tapping into the students’ natural interest and asking them to work with data in their own neck of the woods—Providence, Rhode Island—made them more willing to try their hand at working through challenging materials. “I chose this because I knew they were familiar with the area. So I figured this is a super-cool tool to start to dig into environmental justice.”

The Greene School’s principal, Alex Edelmann, sees it as schools’ job to expand the bank of what students care about while helping them develop new skills. She says, “That idea of fostering curiosity is partly about showing that they can understand difficult things, that they can take on difficult topics, and that the learning can be their own. Even though there are these state standards that we have to cover, that doesn’t mean that the learning can’t be applied in a really rich and relevant way.”

For more ideas on how to make math more relevant and centered in the real world, read Sarah Gonser’s article for Edutopia, “Will Ditching Calculus Make Math More Relevant?”