One of my favorite lines from Ted Lasso is “Be curious, not judgmental.” It is often attributed to Walt Whitman, though as far as anyone can tell he never actually said it, which feels like a small lesson in curiosity all by itself. Over the years, those four words have become something of a guiding principle for me. I find myself returning to them often, sometimes quietly to myself and sometimes out loud to the people around me. Be curious. Reserve judgment.
That reminder has mattered more than ever this year. Moving to Beijing and joining BCIS meant entering a new country, a new culture, and a new school all at once. When something is different from what I know or expect, it is easy to make a quick assumption or compare it to how things were done somewhere else. My new colleagues have probably heard me process out loud more than once when I have noticed a system that works differently from one I have seen elsewhere. Leaning into curiosity creates a pause. It encourages me to ask why, listen more carefully, and understand the context before deciding what I think or what we should do. I certainly do not get this right all the time, and none of us does, but I have found that approaching a person, a situation, or an idea with a genuine question usually leads somewhere more useful than beginning with a conclusion.
That idea became the thread running through my weekly messages to our faculty during October. We spent the month thinking about curiosity and inquiry, and about how curiosity helps us understand our students, learn from one another, and build classrooms and a community where questions are valued as much as answers. Looking back, the messages built on one another in a way I had not entirely planned, so I wanted to gather them together here.
We began with questions. Ernő Rubik, the inventor of the Rubik’s Cube, once said that sometimes the questions are more important than the answers, and the line appears in one of my favorite short videos about what education should be (you can watch it here). Schools really do run on questions. Teachers ask them to find out what students understand, where they are confused, and what support they may need. We ask one another questions when we are planning, solving problems, or trying to make a good decision. But students’ questions may be the most important of all. When students learn to ask their own questions, they begin to take ownership of their learning. Instead of waiting for the teacher to provide the next step, they learn to identify what they do not yet understand, follow an idea that interests them, and decide what they need to explore next. A thoughtful student question can take a lesson in a direction none of us anticipated and help an entire class see something differently. That does not always happen naturally, though. Students need classrooms where questions are encouraged, where uncertainty is treated as part of learning, and where they do not feel they must already know the answer before they are allowed to speak.
From there, we turned to what happens after we ask. Stephen Covey’s advice to “seek first to understand, then to be understood” is a reminder that curiosity is as much about listening as it is about questioning. Listening sounds simple, but active listening requires more than staying quiet while someone else speaks. It means paying attention without using that time to prepare our response, defend our position, or decide how we will solve the problem, which is something I have to actively remind myself not to do. It is easy to listen while also waiting for our turn to talk, and when that happens we may hear the words but miss what the person is actually trying to tell us. In schools, we often enter conversations ready to offer advice, clarify an expectation, or explain what needs to change. Sometimes that is exactly what is needed. At other times, a pause, a follow-up question, or an attempt to restate what we have heard leads to a very different understanding. A student who has not completed an assignment may be confused, overwhelmed, disengaged, or simply avoiding the work. A student who is unusually quiet may be struggling, processing, or waiting to feel safe enough to speak. The same behavior can have many different explanations, and active listening helps us move beyond the first one. It gives students the experience of being heard, and it gives us better information about how to respond. Sometimes the most useful thing we can offer is not an immediate answer but our full attention.
We closed the month with a line from Zora Neale Hurston, who described research as formalized curiosity, a kind of poking and prying with a purpose. One of the things I appreciate most about working in schools is that there is always something new to learn. Even when we have taught a lesson many times, a different group of students may respond to it in an entirely different way. Early in my career, I worked for a principal who required us to write detailed daily lesson plans and then follow them verbatim, and I have never been a fan of that approach since. Thoughtful planning matters, but no plan can anticipate every question, misunderstanding, or need that emerges once a lesson begins. Teachers need to stay open to what is happening in the room and responsive to the learners in front of them. Great teaching often begins in very ordinary moments. We notice several students making the same mistake, or a class responding differently than we expected, or a student who seems to understand during a discussion but struggles to show that understanding on an assessment. Instead of immediately deciding why, we can become curious. What might be happening here? What could student work tell us? What might we learn by asking the students themselves? Is there a small change we could try? None of this needs to become a formal research project. It might mean reviewing a few exit tickets, trying a different scaffold, asking a colleague what they are seeing, or adjusting one part of tomorrow’s lesson. We try something, pay attention to the result, and decide what to do next. That is curiosity with a purpose. It turns noticing into a question, a question into an action, and an action into new learning.
When I think about the month as a whole, I keep coming back to where it started. Judgment tends to close a question before we have really asked it, while curiosity keeps it open long enough for us to learn something about our students, our colleagues, our practice, and sometimes ourselves. I am still working on that, especially in a place where so much is new to me, and I suspect I always will be.
In November, we are turning that curiosity toward inquiry and a question I have been thinking about a great deal: how do we make our classrooms arenas of discovery? I am imagining classrooms where students do more than receive information, where they ask questions, test ideas, follow evidence, revise their thinking, and play an active role in making sense of what they are learning. I am curious to see where that question takes us.
