Teachers are always looking for new ways to inspire their students. In my 15 years in the classroom, I have often found that this can happen most naturally when we turn this idea around — when we make room for our students to inspire us. The value of letting our kids’ ideas propel classroom work has come home to me many times, but perhaps never as dramatically as in my 4th-grade class last year.

I’ve taught in the same classroom since 2001. But it wasn’t until last winter that anyone thought to investigate the inch-wide gap in our classroom closet — a gap that turned out to lead to a hollow space that was hiding hundreds of fascinating artifacts that had lain undisturbed for up to 100 years.

When one of my students began poking around in the gap during a few free moments, other kids quickly caught his curiosity. In no time, they had devised techniques for extracting everything from century-old coins to ancient school assignments to penny candy wrappers, ink pen nibs, World War I buttons, and on and on.

It was thrilling to see the kids work collaboratively, entirely on their own initiative, to figure out how to get these items out and immediately ask questions about them. Whoever heard of gum for a penny? Had there really been a hat shop around the corner with “hats made to order, odd sizes & shape heads same low price”? And what was a dime worth back in 1905?

Their unquenchable curiosity prompted me to call in the experts. I found a professional archaeologist and an experienced coin collector to come speak with the kids. My students and I created research recording sheets and learned how to find information about our artifacts. They wrote short essays about what they were discovering and we started an Instagram account to keep track of our finds and share them with others (@closetarchaeology). The kids began to get a sense of their own position in historical time.

The idea is to pick up on your students’ interests and cultivate projects relating to the most promising ones.

In 2008, for example, we devoted the first few months of our social studies curriculum to that year’s presidential election. One day, a student casually suggested that we could have a class president. I helped shape the process by listing decisions we had to make, while the students themselves generated additional ideas and made most of the decisions.

We ended up with a five-term school year, term limits for the president and vice president, specific rights and responsibilities and, of course, campaign speeches and an electoral process. The constituents took their decision-making very seriously and demanded the best of their candidates. By the end of the year, a complex set of skills and knowledge about public service had developed in every student, both those who ran for election and those who did not.

Another example of a student-inspired project is happening in my 3rd-grade class this year. After we read excerpts from a diary kept by a 3rd-grade class at the Topaz Relocation Camp in Utah, a student spoke up with the idea that we should keep our own class diary. Through discussion and consensus decision-making, we came up with a process in which every child in the class takes a turn researching, writing and illustrating diary pages. We manage to squeeze this work in during a short break time in the morning and the time when we pack up at the end of the day.

I see the students reading through the growing diary whenever they have a free moment. They are developing literacy skills and at the end of the year we will have an amazing document to help us remember our experiences.

Almost inevitably, student-generated projects have an intrinsic community-building element to them. When the kids buy in because it’s their project, a sense of collaborative ownership develops that is rare and valuable, one that you can’t put a grade or a score on. These are projects that help kids see school, in general, as a worthwhile place to be; a place where you can explore your ideas and see them blossom, and where your teachers and classmates will respond enthusiastically and help you.

We as teachers can help this happen through the age-old, low-tech means of observing our students and encouraging them to express and develop their own ideas. Together we can create a virtuous cycle of mutual inspiration.

Miriam Sicherman is a 3rd-grade teacher at the Children’s Workshop School in the East Village.