LEARNING BY DOING CENTER MATE ON LINE TALIM FOR MATHS AND SCIENCE TEACHER

This bears on the ideas brought up earlier of the thematic organization of cases in a course. Cases cannot be easily remembered if they are not part of some organized set of expectation s about a certain class of behaviors. It may be appealing to tell Paul Revere and George Washington stories to children who may well respond to them as children respond to any well told story. But if we want children to remember what they have been told and put that story to use in some way, they need to be told with some coherent themes in mind, building each new point on an expectation set up by a prior case.

In order to get good at making decisions then, students need to make a great many of them. A cognitive GBS must allow students the opportunity to make numerous decisions and to discuss those decisions with other students. 

The purpose of the discussion is to encourage the collection of features and ways of talking about those features that help one discriminate between choices. Students must not only be allowed to choose, they must also reflect on why they chose the way they did. To do this they must be able to defend their choices and to do this they need to be able to articulate the features of a situation that caused them to make the decisions they did Understanding Life Teaching the EFK that is part of understanding life is rather complicated. One problem is that unlike domains of knowledge discussed above, there is little agreement on the facts. Another problem is that unlike day to day decision making, there is no program of ordered decisions that can be gone through to arrive at nuances of knowledge. For example, let’s return to the two adages cited above:

Let’s imagine that instead of chocolate milk the baby suddenly finds itself drinking Chateau Mouton-Rothschild 1966. No one will find Mouton-Rothschild to be a great wine if it is the first wine they have ever drunk. Before you can discriminate great wine, you have to have first drunk wine. Very few of us drink our first glass of wine and rave about the experience. Wine is, after all, not what you expected. Few of us like our first taste of wine or beer or anything alcoholic, for that matter. We all know that we have to learn to develop a taste for such things, but what does it mean to “develop a taste?” The first time we have a new experience, we only have prior experiences to work with. If we want to learn important discriminations in a taste, for instance, it is helpful if those discriminations are rather on the fine side. If the discriminations are rather gross, then little will be learned from the connoisseur’s point of view. If everything happens the way you expected it to happen, you may well be happy, but you won’t learn a thing.

Many elementary schools are smarter than this and teach kids to play anyway. The same is not true, unfortunately, in subjects considered more central to a child’s education. We don’t let children just do physics. In fact, we hardly even know what that means. We do let students do math, because we know what that means, but we lose track of why we are doing it. One reason, I suspect, is that schools really like to teach micro-scripts when they can identify them. They are easy to measure and thus fit well into our test oriented society.