Susan Dougherty writes about her career as a fourth-grade teacher at Bayberry School in Watchung, New Jersey.

As I began my career in education I held firm one belief about students; they must be active participants in the classroom. Twelve years later I hold that same basic belief but have refined what it means for a learner to be active.

Early in my career active meant that my students would not sit in rows and spend the day doing seatwork. My first position as a kindergarten teacher quickly revealed that I might strive for something greater than physical activity. Of course kindergarten students are active--try and keep them from being anything but active! I came to recognize that while active bodies can be important, what I really wanted was to engage the minds of my students.

As I taught students at many elementary levels, I learned to ask probing questions that required my students to consider their learning carefully. How do you know to add these two numbers? What kind of person do you think the main character of this story is? How would you explain why oil floats on water to someone who didn't understand? While my students were often physically active, acting out scenes from a novel we were reading, experimenting with magnets or prisms, or using pattern blocks to build models of math problems, they also spent time physically inert but inwardly engaged in active thought.

Soon, however, I was not satisfied with simply engaging the minds of my students. I wanted to reach their hearts. I wanted to awaken a passion for learning within each student. How might a teacher encourage the awakening of such passion? One key, I think, is to allow and encourage the students to ask and seek the answers to their own questions. In this way, students' minds and hearts become active, leading them on a lifelong journey of inquiry and self-motivated learning.