The support of teachers and school staff, like that of parents, is crucial for proper development of kids’ sparks. While some kids find that their teachers encourage them to discover and develop their sparks, many say that they don’t receive support from anyone at school. This section contains ideas for making sparks a part of your everyday classroom activities, to make sure that your students are getting the opportunities they need to find out what moves them.
Why Use Sparks in the Classroom?
- To connect with your students around their strongest interests or talents.
- To open an avenue you can use to engage (or re-engage) students in your subject, even if they don’t care for or do well at that subject.
- For an opportunity to increase your job satisfaction by allowing you to bring your strongest interests or talents into the classroom and the larger school community
Connecting with Students via Sparks
- When you have a few moments to connect with a student, try using the information you now have on their sparks to open a conversation on spark development or spark exploration.
- Use these six essential questions to start a deeper spark conversation:
- What is your spark?
- When and where do you live your spark
- Who knows your spark?
- Who helps feed your spark?
- What gets in your way?
- How can I help?
- Consider helping students in your classes who share the same spark to get to know one another.
Engage Your Students with Sparks
- Connect students’ sparks to your curriculum and to your efforts in differentiating instruction. For example, a student whose spark is math could
- read a biography of a famous mathematician;
- study the history of math’s development in Egypt and elsewhere;
- use proportions, ratios, and patterns in creating artworks;
- seek uses of mathematics in a daily newspaper or a magazine;
- explore the use of math in music;
- create polls and resulting statistics for the school newspaper or yearbook.
- Work with a school librarian to create a display of biographies and autobiographies that highlight the sparks of people in your subject area; be sure to cover both common and unusual spark categories.
- Help students make a spark connection next time you have them choose a topic for a paper or project; it just may help them stay more focused and enthusiastic.
Bring Your Own Sparks into the Classroom
Most teachers would say that teaching is their spark—but many have other sparks, perhaps in topics that aren’t even connected to the subject area they teach. Wouldn’t it be fun to put those sparks into play at school? Here are three ways to try:
- Start asking other staff members about their sparks. You may find a colleague you haven’t interacted with much who shares your spark. If so, take a moment to chat and agree to be spark supporters for one another.
- After finding out about your school staff’s sparks, are there any matches with the sparks of students in your classes? Consider having an event in which staff and students gather by spark categories they favor to discover possible great connections, new clubs needed at the school, and other things such as this.
- If you don’t seem to have other sparks these days, consider picking up an earlier spark (from when you were a teen, maybe) or jump into spark exploration with your students and find a new one. You’re never too young or too old to find a new spark!
