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Teachers who rebuilt their classrooms around wonder.

Educators

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Ms. Abara replaced her classroom's 'rules' poster with a question wall

After eleven years teaching primary science, Ngozi Abara noticed her students stopped raising their hands to ask things once they hit age nine. She took down the classroom rules poster and put up a cork board instead, where any question could be pinned, answered or not.

The board filled within a week. She began each Friday by choosing three pins and letting the class spend the last period chasing one down, sometimes with an experiment, sometimes with a borrowed book, once with a phone call to a local university lecturer.

Test scores in her class rose the following term, but Ngozi says the real change was quieter: kids who used to sit silently started arguing about ideas at lunch.

312

questions pinned in one school year

14%

rise in end-of-term science scores