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2018
Volume 58, Issue 1
  • ISSN: 0007-8204
  • E-ISSN: 1943-2216

Abstract

Outside their classrooms, teachers ask questions about texts because they feel curious. Inside the classroom, teachers’ questions about texts can become untethered from curiosity. In this article, the authors pursue their own curiosity and encourage teacher educators and teacher candidates to explore what happens when teachers’ text-based questions are motivated by genuine curiosity. They first explore how historical practices and current constraints keep teachers from exercising curiosity in the classroom while enforcing a mind/body split that diminishes the teaching experience. They then draw from a study of instructional rehearsals to compare the types of questions asked by teachers in different roles before suggesting that teachers’ experiences of everyday feelings of curiosity are central to classroom teaching. Lastly, the authors offer ways that teacher educators can help teachers value and recover their feelings of curiosity in the classroom.

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2025-10-01
2026-06-09
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