Students’ imaginations are often considered as something that might be engaged after the hard work of learning has been done. Countering such beliefs, Egan and Judson show that the imagination—one of the great workhorses of learning—can be used to make all learning and all teaching more effective. Through techniques that any teacher can learn and easily apply in any classroom, they demonstrate how and why imagination can be used across the curriculum and grade levels to make teaching and learning more interesting, engaging, and pleasurable for all. Teachers who use these techniques will discover the emotions, images, stories, metaphors, sense of wonder, heroic narratives, and other cognitive tools that can bring life and energy to their classroom. This practical handbook will help teachers learn how to use these enlivening techniques in their daily practice to stimulate students’ intellectual activity and growth.

Book Features:

• A comprehensive description of imagination’s role in thinking and learning.
• Field-tested teaching strategies for the K–12 classroom.
• Cross-curricular examples showing IE making a real difference for teachers and students.
• A “cognitive toolkit” to spur active learning and meaningful interaction.

“What fun! Readers will get a host of practical ideas to make lessons come alive through the exercise of imagination, the use of metaphors, and the telling of stories. Read and enjoy.”

—Nel Noddings, Lee Jacks Professor of Education Emerita, Stanford University

For many children much of the time their experience in classrooms can be rather dull, and yet the world the school is supposed to initiate children into is full of wonder. This book offers a rich understanding of the nature and roles of wonder in general and provides multiple suggestions for to how to revive wonder in adults (teachers and curriculum makers) and how to keep it alive in children. Its aim is to show that adequate education needs to take seriously the task of evoking wonder about the content of the curriculum and to show how this can routinely be done in everyday classrooms. The authors do not wax flowery; they present strong arguments based on either research or precisely described experience, and demonstrate how this argument can be seen to work itself out in daily practice. The emphasis is not on ways of evoking wonder that might require virtuoso teaching, but rather on how wonder can be evoked about the everyday features of the math or science or social studies curriculum in regular classrooms.