As more and more of the world vies for our students’ attention, it’s easy to bemoan social media and short-form videos like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels for distracting learners from what’s happening in the classroom. But what if we started learning from those tools instead of vilifying them?
We don’t have to love every aspect of social media, but applying a growth mindset to our perspective can shift us from, “Why aren’t they engaging with my class?” to “Why are they engaging with these videos, and how can I duplicate it?” In fact, to thrive as modern teachers, we can take some lessons from influencers and bring their structures into our classroom. While there are many reasons people get hooked on social media, curiosity is a big one. Let’s look at a few curiosity-building strategies that we can build into our classroom lessons.
Building Mystery
Social media is very good at creating clickbait thumbnails to get users’ attention. (“You won’t believe what happened next!” or “I’m reviewing five backpacks, but I’m only keeping one!”) Why not borrow from that technique and create a little mystery around your content to get students wondering what’s going to be taught next?
In the classroom, you can build little mysteries all over the place–either directly about the content you’re teaching or around what students think about a topic. For example, during a science lesson, you might conduct a common experiment on surface tension, adding paper clips to a full glass of water and asking students to predict how many can go in before the glass overflows. This activity is already a mystery builder, but you can also add mystery to the mystery. Using an online tool such as Padlet (padlet.com), students can submit their guesses about how many paper clips will fit. You can hide their answers until you’re ready to reveal them and you can challenge them to guess their classmates’ answers, too.
Start with a student who’s not shy about being called on and ask: “How many do you think Jeanne guessed?” Let the class shout out their answers before you show her guess, then play a quick comparison game: “And do you think Pat guessed higher or lower?” After a few of these fun interactions, you can start the demonstration as usual.
These small tricks stack curiosity around a scientific application; students are not only interested in how many paper clips fit in the glass, but also which of the students had the best guess and how close their predictions came to the right answer.
Connecting Background Knowledge to Content
Why do so many of us watch videos on topics we’re already familiar with? We like to reinforce what we already know and hopefully add a few nuggets of information onto our previously built knowledge. As teachers, we understand this concept as “activating the schema,” but until recently, we had to take a broad approach to this in our classrooms, relying on popular movies, chart-topping songs, and other areas of mass appeal in hopes of capturing the most student interest. These days, however, we can use AI to help each student understand content from their personal perspective.
On the back-end of a chatbot like Playlab (playlab.ai) or MagicSchool (magicschool.ai), you can create a guiding prompt that will help students make concrete connections to ideas they already know about. Your guiding prompt for a chatbot in a history class might look something like this:
Ask the student to provide three hobbies or areas of interest. Check each to see which might have strong parallels to the launch of World War I. Map events and people between the most relevant student interest and the beginning of the war.
You will need to fine-tune this prompt and check it in whatever AI platform you may use, but giving students a starting point that they can relate to can make relevant what otherwise might feel like old history. Further, after they’ve done their own work, students can partner to compare their developing understanding, and you can correct any gaps or misconceptions that surface.
The topics we teach are interesting, but sometimes we need new ways to communicate what makes them so interesting.
Compelling Storytelling
Every viral video has one thing in common: It tells a compelling story. Whether video creators are teaching you a better way to peel a potato or doing a dashcam monologue from the parking lot about finding a dog running through the aisles of Walmart, good stories captivate us all. You can share some of these videos to open the conversation about how to keep people’s attention with a good story. From there, you can help students transfer the skills to their own stories and help them see what parts capture their audience’s attention.
At first glance, many teachers might be tempted to think that teaching students the skills of storytelling is primarily done in a composition class, but it works across all subject areas. You can challenge students to write stories that show an understanding of anything from how to shoot a basketball to the fundamentals of chemistry. One great way to do this is in Book Creator (bookcreator.com), where students get full control over layout, images, and, of course, writing. There are many interactive elements available, such as adding video, audio, or drawings. If you’re going deep into storytelling, you can give students one page for each element of whatever storytelling framework you are teaching so they can clearly capture the parts of a great story that keep readers’ attention. If you want a faster option that doesn’t require students to learn the ins and outs of design and layout on top of the storytelling, Google Gemini’s Storybook (gemini.google/storybook) can build a story for your students, and then you can ask them what parts they would change or improve.
Making Curiosity Go Viral
The topics we teach are interesting, but sometimes we need new ways to communicate what makes them so interesting. Taking cues from YouTubers, TikTokers, and Instagrammers can pair well with research in educational psychology, social psychology, and pedagogy. The next time you catch yourself scrolling through social media videos, slow down and ask yourself which ones strike your curiosity, which ones don’t, and why. You may just get some insights into how to introduce new content to your students.
