The Importance of Wonder

Recently I was working with some teachers who are getting ready to teach 7th grade and we were talking about the creative writing block most often called Wish, Wonder and Surprise. We had a conversation about each one of these gestures and what makes them different from each other. And we talked about how to have this conversation with students.

Wish

Wish is pretty clear. When I taught 7th grade, the students and I talked about the difference between a wish, a hope and a dream. And we talked about how these words take on a different meaning when your wish, hope or dream is for someone else, or when it’s for the world.

Surprise

Surprise is also fairly clear. It’s that feeling when you’re confronted with something so unexpected that it takes you off-guard. It’s easy to confuse surprise and wonder in this way, but surprise is much more unsettling. Surprise can cause someone to feel a little fearful.

Defining Wonder

And then there’s wonder. Wonder is a feeling that is much more difficult to define. I know, as a teacher, that wonder is a feeling that I want to inspire in my students. I have this sense that wonder is essential to the learning process, but I have a hard time describing what it is. 

So, in preparation for this episode, I did a little research. I found an article on neuroscience that attempts to describe the role that wonder plays in learning. Here are some of the things the article said:

• Wonder is an inner desire to learn that awaits reality in order to be awakened.
• The scope of wonder is greater than that of curiosity.
• Wonder is the center of all motivation and action in the child.
• Wonder is what makes life genuinely personal.
• Beauty is what triggers wonder.

Another article defined wonder by describing the play, exploration, imagination and discovery that often happens for students outside the classroom as they play outside or pretend with friends. And the article sadly mentioned that most of this is left outside the door when students enter a typical classroom. That sense of wonder and awe is not inspired when they take a test or fill in the blanks on a worksheet.

I also found a school website that tried to summarize and define wonder as it described the school’s curriculum. They tried to define wonder by describing phenomena like …

• caterpillars turning into butterflies
• bean seeds sprouting
• the phases of the moon
• the sun rising and setting
• the movement of the clouds

Contemplating these phenomena was probably the closest I got to actually understanding and settling on a definition of wonder in my research.

Experiences of Wonder

The thing is, wonder is really hard to define, but you know it when you experience it. So I decided to think about moments in my own life when I remember feeling what I would describe as wonder.

My examples of experiences of wonder

My poor efforts at defining wonder

• an inbreath, like your breath is taken away a little bit
• viewing something you’ve seen before completely differently
• an opening

And this last bit is why wonder is so important to learning. When students enter a state of wonder, an opening is created. A possibility arises for them to view the world differently and to come to a different understanding. 

Wonder in the Classroom

So, if wonder is so important to learning, how can we create