Content curation is a vital part of the creative process. In this blog post and podcast, we explore why curation matters and how we can help students learn how to engage in the curation process.

Listen to the Podcast

If you enjoy this blog but you’d like to listen to it on the go, just click on the audio below or subscribe via iTunes/Apple Podcasts (ideal for iOS users) or Spotify.

In an Age of AI, We Need Critical Consumers

In my last article, I wrote about how Artificial Intelligence is changing creativity. One of the core ideas is that it is easier than ever to mimic someone else’s style. I can turn a photo of mine into something that looks like it was painted by Van Gogh, Picasso, or Dali. I can come up with my own idea and then ask it to generate something in the style of Studio Ghibli.

Meanwhile, we live in a world an instant information ecosystem, where ideas go viral without much thought regarding accuracy and validity. It’s a place where content is cheap. Cheap to make. Cheap to share. Cheap to consume. And even cheaper now with AI. The traditional gatekeepers are gone, which has some real advantages for students. They can create and share their work in ways that were previously unimaginable.

But there’s a cost. The best stuff doesn’t always rise to the top and, if we’re not careful, we mistake the speed of consumption for the depth of knowledge (an idea I explore in my upcoming book The Depth Advantage). We need students to slow down and become critical consumers. We need to make sure they’re not falling victim to misinformation. This is part of why they need to engage in slower, more methodical prompt engineering like the FACTS Cycle.

In an age of generative AI, critical consumption isn’t just about spotting misinformation (though that is of vital importance). It’s also about identifying quality, recognizing originality, and filtering through a flood of content to find what actually matters. This skill helps students develop their own creative voice as they evaluate works from multiple domains. But it can also help them find new strategies and ideas. It’s a chance to connect various works, concepts, and strategies from multiple sources. In other words, a critical lens will help our students become more creative in a world of AI.

Critical Consuming Leads to Creativity

When we think of creativity, it’s easy to picture a person coming up with something entirely new, pulling it from thin air and making it from scratch. But if you watch people engaged in creative work, they are often critical consumers of the same type of work they create. There’s this ongoing cycle of critical consuming, inspiration, and creative work. As they create more, it leads to a deeper ability to consume critically, where they find more inspiration, and the cycle continues. It’s an idea I explored in the following sketch video:

Chefs enjoy great meals. Musicians listen to great music. Engineers make sense out of what other people have designed. The better they are at consuming, the more likely they are to be inspired to create something new. So, if we want students to be makers, we need students to be critical consumers.

This is why we need students to learn the art of curation. By curating what they consume (read, watch, and listen to, etc.) they begin to notice patterns. They identify artistic styles. They learn what resonates and why. Critical consumption sharpens their judgment and sparks new ideas. It’s the key to developing a unique style, challenging assumptions, and finding more human-centered solutions to complex problems. In a world full of noise, critical consumption is how students learn to tune in to what’s useful or interesting.

In the book Range, David Epstein argues that our unique advantage is found in developing skills that move across domains. In other words, you find your unique niche, not by getting really good at one thing but by being good at a unique set of skills that often seem unrelated. If you think about Hamilton, Lin Manuel Miranda is a solid performer but not the greatest of all actors. He’s really good at composition but there are others out there who are considered absolute masters of the craft. He can certainly rap but no one puts him at the top five of all time. But it’s his unique blend combined with his unique perspective that makes him stand out.

So, if we think about this idea of “range,” the same thing is true for students. They’ll need to find connections between ideas. They’ll need to find interesting ideas and works from multiple domains and combine them in interesting interesting. That’s why content curation is so vital in an age of Generative AI.

What Is Content Curation?

The best curators know how to find what is best by immersing themselves in a niche area while also making surprising connections between ideas in seemingly unrelated worlds. Curators find specific excerpts that are relevant at the moment but also timeless. They can explain the purpose, the context, and the necessity of what they are citing.

I’m drawn toward an archaic definition of the term. It originally had a much more earthy, even gritty, connotation. Some linguists tie it back to the Medieval Latin word curare, which meant “to cure an illness.” It had a connotation of providing loving attention and management. Other linguists tie the word “curator” goes back to the word curatus, which meant, “spiritual guide,”or “one responsible for the care of souls.”

Over time, this word morphed into a deep care and love for a particular subject, knowledge, or set of artistic works. Think of art curators who define the spaces of a museum. They know the works on a deep level and can explain the meaning and purpose in ways that make the work more relevant.

Some of the best curators are able to tap into that original sense of being “one responsible for the care of souls.” They care, not only about what the work means but about how it will make you a better person when you interact with it.

As teachers, this is what we do. We help students grow in wisdom. We’re curators.

But that’s also what we want with our students. We want them to have both an excited passion and a nuanced care for what they are learning. We want them to pay attention to context and purpose in the information they consume. We want them to make connections and provide their own lens.

What does curation typically look like?

The best curators are the ultimate geeks. They nerd out on key ideas, movements, information, and artistic works. Whether it’s a painting or a mathematical process, they find joy in the process of discovery. While there is an overlap with criticism, curators are more likely to geek out on the subject in a way that is explanatory instead of evaluative. This is often combined with a desire to make a work accessible to the public. On some level, both curators and critics are the gatekeepers of information (I know, I know, I mentioned earlier that the gatekeepers are gone). However, while critics are the ones shutting the gates, curators are often the ones who open the gates and convincing people to come inside. A true curator is someone who is both a fan and a critic. They are constantly celebrating but also critiquing work:

If all of that seems too abstract, here are a few things that are a part of the curation process:

• Searching for Content: The best curators are the ones who can find content that not everyone notices.
• Geeking Out on Content: The best curators are able to collect and consume great content. It’s not mindless consumption. It is mindful and relaxed but also sharp and analytical. One of the things I’ve noticed about great curators is that they scribble notes all over the margins of books and yet they feel the complete freedom to skim and skip when necessary. They know how to find the information that actually matters. There’s often this aspect where curators go for quantity but they do so in a way where they can slow down and pay close attention when something catches their eye.
• Organizing Content: Curation often involves placing content into categories or themes. Often, students will try and figure out the “right” way to organize the information, because schools typically teach students an external organizational system. However, with content curation, the classification process is deeply personal and should mirror the way that students think. It’s a chance to engage in tagging and categorizing in a way that feels meaningful to the students.
• Making Connections: The best curators are able to find connections between seemingly opposite artists, ideas, or disciplines in ways that make you think, “Man, I never considered that before.”
• Finding Trends: This aspect of curation is a little more analytical. Sometimes it even involves picking apart data or crunching numbers. It’s the idea of looking at information across several spaces and finding specific trends. This is often where someone arrives at a different, counterintuitive conclusion.
• Adding a Unique Lens: Curators rarely write in-depth explanations of the content. There’s typically a certain clarity and brevity in the commentary they add. When done well, a curator almost seems invisible, moving along the snippets of content. And yet, over time, you begin to appreciate the subtle personality and voice of a curator. If the critic and commentator sometimes falls victim to shouting their opinions, the curator is gently whispering a relevant idea to a distracted culture.
• Sharing the Content: Content curation has the end goal of getting great content into the hands of a larger audience. It is deliberately others-centered, even when the curator is introspective. Sometimes, the goal is to provide a set of practical information into the hands of readers. Others are more about offering something intriguing, even if it’s not inherently practical.

If we think about this idea of AI, we can have students interact with AI chatbots and ask questions about various sources, movements, and approaches. It might be a Notebook LM podcast conversation about three different articles or it might be something where a student asks questions about how multiple authors addressed the cultural fears present in the Cold War. I realize that this feels pretty big and even abstract. However, as we integrate AI into this process, we should still make sure that it is human-driven and AI-informed.

So, what does this look like in the classroom?

Four Ways to Get Started with Content Curation in the Classroom

The following are five ways to get started on the student content curation process.

1. Model content curation.

Notice that few students walk into class with curation skills. We live in a consumer culture that values speed and amusement over slower, deliberate thought that is needed in curation. It’s not surprising then, that teachers often need to model the curation process. Others might use spreadsheets or shared documents. Still, others might have students organize key information in sketchnotes and elaborate on their ideas in journals. I love the idea of starting with a private journal as a way for students to discover their interests and geek out on new ideas:

However, as they get into the journaling process, they can then share their curations with a larger audience. It might be something a visual curation process similar to what you might find on Pinterest. Or it might be a series of podcast episodes that they do.

When I taught middle school, students often created their Curiositycasts, where they would explore a question and share their answers with an audience as a series of podcast episodes. It might also be a short presentation or video that they create. Or they might go with a more literal example of a curation and have students create their own museums where they find primary and secondary sources and display the information in an interactive way. Students can then invite the community to visit their museums.

Note that this is where librarians play such a critical role. They can help students with the process of finding, organizing, and sharing critical information. They are the true curators of the school community and the experts in developing information literacy.

A librarian might model content curation for first graders by reading aloud from multiple nonfiction books on the same topic and guiding students to compare what they’ve learned. With fifth graders, they might co-create an anchor chart of trusted sources, then model how to pull key ideas from articles into a shared research organizer. For high school juniors, the librarian could lead a mini-lesson on lateral reading, walk students through how to evaluate bias and credibility, and then support them as they curate sources for a multi-genre research project.

2. Focus on student Voice and choice.

As students move from passive consumers to active curators, they begin to take more ownership of how they gather, evaluate, and organize information. Instead of relying solely on pre-selected materials, they learn to navigate complex sources and make intentional choices about what to include and why.

We can start by empowering students to choose the topics as they “geek out” on the content. Curators are natural geeks. They get excited about ideas and topics within their domain. They engage in research in a way that feels like an adventure. If we want students to engage in content curation, we need to let them geek out. Tap into their prior knowledge and let them run with it. A great starting place here is Geek Out Blog project, where students explore their geeky interests and share what they find with an authentic audience. This is an extension of the notion of a Genius Hour project

The key idea here is that we truly provide permission to let students geek out on whatever topic they want. It’s truly based on student choice. If they love fashion or Minecraft or TikTok videos, let them run with it. This builds on student’s prior knowledge and their sense of autonomy. Along the way, it can create more buy-in and improve engagement. As a teacher, you can encourage students to go deeper in their topics by asking critical thinking questions and encouraging them to see how their topics connect to various systems, ideas, and communities. This can actually be a great way to help students build empathy.

They should choose the topics, the questions, and the sources they find interesting. This could connect to research, silent reading, blogging, or Genius Hour. It’s also important to let students choose the platform. Curation can happen in a journal or a notebook if they want to keep it private. Or it could happen in a blog, in a podcast, or in a video series. In some cases, visual curation sites can work for students who want to organize things in a spatial manner.

Notice here that students are not only choosing the topic and the sources but they are also explaining why it stands out to them. They are making those critical “text to self” and “text to world” connections that will help the develop their own distinct creative voice in a sea of sameness. They are also making critical connections and organizing the content in a way that mirrors the synaptic connections in their brains.

3. Spend more time on it.

Content curation takes time. Take a look at any master curator and you’ll see this commitment to time. There’s no way around it. If you want to see students curate, you have to carve out specific time for it. However, we can integrate curation into the daily process of information consumption. This can feel challenging in certain subjects, where we feel the time crunch and the need to cover plenty of content. However, the curation process is often about how students organize and select information. They can engage in curation as they read secondary and primary sources in social studies or as they read informational texts about concepts and ideas in science. They can curate math strategies and compare and contrasts process. They can curate as they engage in research in an ELA class.

Students might do a gallery walk or a station rotation where they compare and contrast sources. They might connect various concepts or strategies using sticky notes and short explanations with arrows back and forth. When I taught social studies, I would do 2-day curation projects where students could ask questions and gather resources based on their interests. We would often start with a Wonder Day activity, where students asked a question, found answers, and summarized their findings.

The next day, they would engage in a curation. Students might rank the best inventions of the 19th century or select key figures from a war. They might curate examples of modern art or create a curation timeline of fashion. There so many ways for them to explore history through curation in a way that still aligned to the topics and standards they were learning.

I also think it helps to start earlier. Traditionally, teachers wait until the end of the year to have students do research. It’s usually part of a multi-week project. If you begin at the beginning of the year, they will slowly learn the art of curation as the year progresses. So, going back to this idea of the time crunch, you are essentially scrapping the big research project and instead integrating research, curation, and communication into multiple unit plans you design.

4. Integrate curation into other projects.

I recently did a workshop for teachers in Hong Kong where we explored the connection between content curation and design thinking. I realize that this might seem like a strange combination but it was so fun to talk about two strategies that are so often treated as separate strategies. I want to share how we might use curation throughout a design thinking project. As a quick refresher, here is the LAUNCH Process:

Here is what it looks like:

• Look, Listen, and Learn: At the start of the project, students explore a curated set of launch resources. These might include photos, videos, news articles, quotes, or artifacts that help build background knowledge and spark curiosity. Students can use a visible thinking routine like “See, Think, Wonder” to make sense of what they’re noticing.
• Ask Tons of Questions: Students can access a curation of multiple preexisting questions and question frames. They can also organize questions and rate which questions work best using something like a QFT technique
• Understanding the Process or Problem: Students begin the research process by accessing a curation of articles from the teacher and then as they do their own research, they can create their own curation of the articles, podcasts, and videos they access. As the project unfolds, they can add to this collection with their own discoveries from field trips, guest speakers, or personal experiences.
• Navigating Ideas: Students might engage in a curation process as they plan out their core plan. For example, they could do a curation of blogs or podcasts in a multimedia composition project. They could curate short videos before doing a PSA project. They might curate multiple currently existing solutions before finding a unique solution (often one that blends ideas from multiple existing solutions)  in a STEM project.
• Create a Prototype: Students can curate examples of similar prototypes, product designs, or approaches before they begin building. They might gather images, screenshots, diagrams, or sketches to inspire their own designs. For writing-based projects, students might curate mentor texts that show various techniques they want to try.
• Highlight and Fix: During the revision phase, students can curate feedback they’ve received, from peers, teachers, or even community partners—and organize it by themes or action steps. They might also curate revision strategies (such as mini-lessons, sentence frames, or tutorials) to guide how they iterate on their work. This kind of targeted curation helps them focus on the most meaningful changes.
• Scaffolds and Supports: Students can create a personal toolkit by curating scaffolds and supports that work best for them. For example, a fourth grader might save a sentence frame chart, a graphic organizer, and a vocabulary list in their writing folder. A high school student might bookmark tutorials, reference guides, and helpful AI prompts in a shared document so they can pull from the tools that match their needs as the project progresses.

You Are Already a Curator

People often say things like, “the teacher is no longer the source of information now that students can curate it themselves.” This is typically accompanied by the term “guide on the side” to describe a teacher’s role.

While I see some validity in this sentiment, I think it proves that now more than ever, teachers need to be curators. They need to be geeking out on their subjects. They need to help students figure out where to go. Yes, they might be “on the side,” but they are still guides, helping students navigate the terrain for the first time ever. And that’s precisely what a curator does. We curate so that we can help students learn the art of content curation.

Teachers are already curators. We piece together resources, research, and ideas as we develop lessons. We curate the content that we teach. This isn’t anything new or groundbreaking. It’s what happens when we find a great book or video and share it with our students.

But what if we take this art of curation and teach it to our students as well? What if we empowered students to curate their own content? What if we helped them grow, not only into lifelong learners, but into lifelong curators?