Elementary Education: Science, Brain, Story

Thinking About an Elementary Science Education Curriculum:
Continuing the Conversation

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