 My mom says I was born asking why all of my report cards had some sort of comment about being too talkative But as a kid I wanted to know how the world worked and seemed like the best way to find out would be to ask people To discuss debate and question with them The world was a very confusing place to this little kid and much to my mom's dismay The questioning hasn't ever stopped. Sorry mom. Here are some things. I just thought about this week Why can't a hamster get wet? What if we can solve climate change in three actions? What would they be? What if women's clothes actually had functional pockets? How do we ban the creation of autonomous lethal robotics? How can I learn to decorate fancy cakes and it turns out that within this Constantly churning brain of mine some of these phrases keep appearing and I believe they inspire me to make the world a better place I'm a teacher as well as a Girl Scout leader and it turns out that my questioning nature also helps me support the children in my Care to become makers thinkers and doers for positive change those magic question words are why What if and how? Why is it so important to ask and keep asking well? It's nice to know things and we can make better decisions when we have more points of reference stored up in our brains But this little question word why to me is the heart of curiosity Curious people are engaged people they take their learning seriously They solve their own problems and I'm convinced that PhD students are just people who never stopped questioning With enough why questions you might just create new knowledge to share with the world For young people who ask why support their questions with answers as much as you're able those big book of why type books are Fantastic of course There's lady Alexa and her cousin big Google and Bing has this cool feature where if you ask a question like why is coffee good for you? It also shows the opposing answer Why is coffee bad for you in the old days of searching? We were actually shown quite a bit of bias in the results and if you asked why you probably had your worries and fears Validated so this new searching feature is pretty useful And we want to have kids feel empowered to seek out answers to the questions that come up in their lives But we also want those questions to be rooted in truth So we have to give them some research skills as well for my own kids That means taking a weekly trip to the library and asking them to choose a nonfiction book of their choice Alongside their fiction selections the deeper dive of a book is a nice balancing perspective to the internet search That's so available to us But the best way to research is to do the thing that you're questioning I know a fifth-grade classroom that's learning mathematical ratios And of course the kids wanted to know why they were important So the class used this great book ratio by Michael Ruhlman to make pancakes They use strange tools like clean sandbox things and plastic bins and stuff to only measure the ingredients using ratios weird, right? Totally, but pancakes got the idea of ratios into their heads much more quickly than a worksheet And bonus they were super engaged in the learning if we want kids to ask why we need to nurture their curiosity And keep calling it forth giving it value curiosity is the explicit goal. It's fun It keeps kids coming back for more all the way through graduate school sometimes when the work is more Hard fun which we sometimes give grown-up names like fulfilling or persistence But nurturing this flame of curiosity keeps us in the work and connects us to possibilities While growing our abilities The second question we should ask ourselves after we've contemplated why is what if What is the word for knowledge acquisition the things we wanted to discover when we began with why the if Brings forth the possibility with the spark of curiosity What if I went on a walk every day this year? What if I saved up for that dream vacation? What if I got a dog? What if I cleaned out my closet? What if I could really make a difference in my community? Hey Google, why are so many a species going extinct? Well now I might know something new I could even read a book about it or watch a documentary But what if takes it further? How can I stop the extinction change? What can we do to make the world a better place in? 2004 when my daughter was two years old I began thinking about the school experience that I hoped for her and when I looked around in my community I didn't see anything that matched. I began to ask myself and my friends What if we could design a learning experience for our kids? What would it look like if we started with a blank slate? Well where it took me was back to school away from my career as a computer programmer for a degree in education I worked in private schools in informal spaces figuring out how kids learn best without that system holding me back I held on to that what if of school design And in 2016 I opened my own educational nonprofit serving pre-k through 12th grade students and classes for parents What if helps us consider better alternatives to what already exists? It motivates us to be the change agents in the world It moves us from consuming information the what to creating the solution the if Hold on to your dreams to improve or transform education I can tell you those dreams can come true even if the path isn't what you expect Which leads us to the final question how? What if is the possibility the fragment of an idea? How is the engine the path the step by step process of completing tasks till you get closer to your goal? In my classroom students tackle big problems with tangible outputs in their community Here's the framework I use to support their work First we shift from the individualistic grade based Self-benefiting model of most classrooms to the idea of making a real impact in our local communities It's my experience that a real project with real consequences is highly motivating But students need support to complete a big task We use a modified agile methodology for the classroom where they break down a large project into very small pieces And label the time they think it will take to complete each one Teams then divide these tasks based on effort So someone may have four 15 minute tasks while another person has a single one hour task At first this process of decomposing the problem into smaller parts takes a while They have to learn how long it takes to complete something and who's best at what but it becomes routine within about two weeks And making concrete progress is super motivating tasks move from the to-do list to the done list and you can see it Next my classroom requires regular self-reflection Students share their struggles and strategies for solving problems They write regularly about their own performance in moving through tasks and they evaluate how they could improve And they fail So often we like to skip this part. We pretend failure isn't really required or we don't really let students fail Or pretend that it isn't as painful as it seems But the road to creating the reality we envision has big potholes and derailments That educational nonprofit I told you about it opened with a lovely community of families who were invested kids were thriving I'm proud to say we valued diversity and our board was representative of our community that included parents of children with disabilities We had a wide range of economic resources represented and we had people of color We opened with a scholarship program on day one And we closed two years later with money in the bank. That's rare for a nonprofit startup I had some health issues that required me to step back from leadership and the transition to the new leadership didn't go Well, so the board shut it down That failure hurt I closed the doors to the thing I had spent more than 10 years building And I took a job that allowed me to recuperate while still being in the classroom There's a funny thing about people who ask why what if and how though if you do it long enough It becomes a part of you things have come full circle I now run a national ai program within a very unique public high school I bring engaging educational programming to teachers and students around the country But especially to my students here in north carolina Where we're the first state in the nation to adopt a full complement of ai standards within our computer science standards Why? Because ai is changing the world in fundamental ways and no one knows about it Well, what if what if we had informed citizens about the ethical and technical impacts of this new technology artificial intelligence And how how would we go about ensuring that every student? No matter their location or their background had the same opportunity to learn about this When I work with my students on their community projects They also build important mental habits through asking how taking one step at a time toward their final product They have time resources and support in the classroom to meet their goals for the project And all of their goals for the future as well When they stumble they learn from failure and they build the resilience to keep going In the end our communities benefit from asking why what if and how again and again to create the changes we wish to see in the world