When Teachers Make Room For Their Own Curiosity They Defend It For Children

Dr. Karen Brennan has long been fascinated by learning environments that encourage kids to be curious. She’s spent her career thinking about how students develop computational thinking, and what makes a learning environment fertile for kids to show their ingenuity. She developed ScratchEd, an online platform to support educators using Scratch in their classrooms, and has studied elements of effective teaching through MIT Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten research group. Now she’s a faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, leading the Creative Computing Lab.

Since Scratch launched 12 years ago, users have created 43 million projects. That’s a lot of creativity on display. From studying the way kids use the platform, as well as effective classrooms, Brennan has seen four crucial ingredients to curiosity………………………