19 April follow up

Further discussion of "transactional", "open-ended" re "child-centered", "constructivist"

• Make teacher a learner, as well as a modeler of open-ended inquiry
• Make students teachers
• Make things more alive both for students AND teachers
  • Help students see teaching/growing up as appealing

Problems

• How put in constraints on inquiry?
  • Guess at likely "generativity"
• Won't work some times
• Requires being willing to be wrong, non-authoritative (fits Quaker "seeking")
• Need to ALSO make science "visible"
  • For next level of education, for careers, for parents/reviewers
• How value/use "expertise"?
  • Can imagine where people going but never know for sure, can be surprised
• Some kids overprogrammed but there are also legitimate needs for structure
  • Fit structure to kids but always with objective of making better inquirers
• Developmental competences, re inquiry, re observations/interpretations, subtleties thereof, re content

Further PG thoughts

• Aspiration is to make teachers "scientists"
  • Active inquirers AND aware of additional relevant bodies of observations/interpretations
• Need to think more about/understand better developmental competences
• Need to work, in that context, on
  • Overall curricular coherence
  • Content
  • Making science visible
  • Information technology
• PK and K ... help develop taste for discovering new ways to see things?
  • Begin with scales in space/time, changes in space/time
  • Use self/humans as reference point

Today ... Wil Franklin, wfrankli@brynmawr.edu

• Grounds as inquiry space, particular classroom activities

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