🚀 go-pugleaf

 Yevgeny Kaplun wrote:
>(which never happens). So the process of teaching could be organized
 >this way: observation >> question >> basic knowledge >> observation with
 >expectation of result >> dissapointment >> better knowledge >> predictions
 >>> observation >> satisfaction. The other way is an invitation for invention.

First, I interpret these as processes of learning, not so much teaching.

The order of the above processes begs the question of what do you observe
in the first place?  Let's look at scientists for illumination.  Scientist
themselves are embedded within a research paradigm to which they were
enculturated for the most part up to and through graduate school and
professional life.  The world view they have aquired this way frames the
types of observations they make.

Consider this gedanken: a biologist looking at a mountainside may "observe"
the patterns in the types of flora, how they vary with altitude and relate
this to the  evolutionary processes of variation and natural selection.  A
geophysicist looking at the same mountainside may instead "observe"
patterns in the relief of the rock, the contours of the landscape and
relate this to glacial processes.  These two scientists could have been, at
a raw level of description, detecting the very same photons of the
countryside, yet they were "observing" very different things.  Each
scientist's own conceptual framework oriented what each saw.  They attended
to different phenomena although each "looked" at the same landscape.

So - how does this distill into teaching science?  It may be the wrong
question to ask "what of the above processes goes first?"  Perhaps on the
level of the individual child these are cyclic.  But this missies the
social and historical contexts. Perhaps we need to address that each
discipline incorporates a world view in which there is a history of
scientists that have been apprenticed and have gone through these
processes.  How then do we bring children into these disciplinary world
views while engaging them actively in the above processes?

Hope I have confused things.
Bill Barowy
Educational Technology,
Bolt Beranek and Newman,
150 CambridgePark Drive,  Cambridge MA  02140
(W) 617 - 873 - 2036  (F) 617 - 873 - 2455