The other part of my EPSRI Congress presentation was to present my thinking on an analogy that Hunter and Rachel came up with for instruction, and how it applies to different instructional knowledge.
Here's the analogy:
- Cabin in the woods = Content knowledge
- Path to cabin = Instructional method
- Wilderness skills = Scientific thinking skills
- Navigation skills = Problem-solving skills
Most physics instructors care about their students getting to the cabin (there may be supplies there that you need for the next leg of your journey). But most physics instructors also agree that just getting to the cabin is not enough; it matters how you get there and what you learn along the way. However, there are lots of different ideas about which method is best.
Here is my characterization of different teach methods' relationship to the cabin in the woods:
- Leslie’s Teaching Method (SGSI / Responsive Teaching) – Ask questions to get them started on path towards woods, let them find their own path, redirect them if they’re on a path that is clearly not going towards the cabin.
- Guided Inquiry – Guiding along a specific path
- Pure Discovery – Exploring the woods (who cares if you ever get to the cabin?)
- Direct Instruction – Helicopter air drop
Peter Shaffer said he found this explanation extremely helpful and comforting. He had been worried that we were just letting the teachers wander lost in the woods, and this helped him understand what we were doing and that it was not the thing he feared.
Though if you have navigation skills and problem solving skills, being "lost in the woods" can be fun - it's where physicists spend their time, no?
ReplyDeleteI also think that I have multiple "cabins" when I'm in an SGSI mode (which is a little different, perhaps, from what David calls responsive teaching) - and that my emphasis is NOT on getting to those cabins, but shaping their navigational skills (or helping them understand how to assess their own progress... is that navigational skill?).
No no ... the more I think about it the more uncomfortable I am. Learning science IS learning the navigation, and not the navigation helps us get to the content, as if there were multiple ways of understanding content, as if content can be "reached" without navigational skills.
Yes. that's what I think. Scientific content as location/place is distracting.
And this is why I don't think-and-talk.
Another note: I had lunch with Peter a week after your talk, and he said again then that this analogy was really helpful. I think it really struck him.
ReplyDeleteReading David Hammer's "Discovery Learning and Discovery Teaching" and came across this gem:
ReplyDelete"On the view of teaching and curriculum that I am promoting, a curriculum succeeds not by guiding the flow of learning and instruction but by helping to establish an arena of activity rich with opportunities for student and teacher discovery...Presuming uncertainty, the teacher does not expect students to arrive at given insights at given moments; rather, it is the teacher's responsibility to recognize when and if they arrive at those insights or others, to discover their progress, and diagnose their difficulties. The teacher's role is not simply to keep students on the right path; it is to find out what paths there are, to scout ahead to see where they may lead, and to make judgments about which ones to follow."
Somehow this feels different than your description of pure discovery above. Not sure whether you consider David Hammer's method "pure discovery" or not, but thought this might interest you.