Cultivating Questioners

Welcome to cultivatingquestioners.com! I am a first-year educator about to begin teaching second grade in rural Maine.

I’ve decided to keep this blog as a way to keep my critical lenses active as I move away from the realm of being a student to being the individual facilitating instruction in the classroom. In this blog, I hope to post weekly reflections on my own practice, my experiences implementing curriculum with my students, my thoughts about developments in education, and tips and tricks for educators also trying to break through the status quo in classroom practice. Through an assortment of different types of posts, I hope to engage in a dialogue about all aspects of the field of education.

The image accompanying this post is of “Q,” my classroom mascot. I plan to call my students “The Curious Questioners” this year, in hopes of encouraging them to keep asking questions, as I believe it is learning to interrogate that will aid my students in becoming critical thinkers and lifelong learners. Similarly, “Q” is also designed to embody this value in a tangible way. He will be posted on my classroom door and students, parents, and other visitors will see him every time they walk in the door. I hope that these simple, yet intentional practices will help remind my second graders to channel their natural curiosity into questions for their peers to explore.

With my very first “first day of school” less than three weeks away, I am working hard on developing curriculum and on setting up my classroom. Stay tuned for future posts that will feature a tour my classroom and an introduction to my September unit of study: Biographies and You!