After the nature of science and content, we come to the third leg of our platform, pedagogy.  I understand science to be essentially about making sense of things, and so that is my aim as I teach: that students would understand the material, be able to give an account of concepts and theories and the things they explain.  I understand that a crucial resource in coming to understand scientific concepts and theories is the history of science, which offers us insights into what it really means to buy into these concepts and theories.  But we still have to teach it.  How will we do so?

The leading feature of the little sketch we traced was the puzzle:  is heat a dancer or a dance?  There is a tendency to tell students what they need to know, instead of asking them how they might make sense of things.  In an intriguing book, A is for Ox Barry Sanders talks about the importance of talk: “Young children need to feel lost, confused, and bewildered enough to concoct their own stories in order to climb out of tight situations.  They need to string together narrative threads from here and there to reach meaning in their lives.”

As with the development of children, so too with the development of students.  Telling students what they need to know strikes me as too passive.  Students do not uncover.  That is the work of the text and the teacher.  There is no driving perplexity and so no push to string together a narrative that explains things.

By framing our study with the option, dance or dancer, we move away from telling students the answer.  In effect, the alternative to teaching students the answer is to teach them two answers and to invite them to sort out their strengths and weaknesses, the issues that critically distinguish them.

This respect for the role of problems sets up another clear aspect of our sketch.  The lab investigations were framed by problems rather than protocols.  Instead of carefully laying out what students were to do, I worked to carefully lay out an issue and invited them to figure out how they might resolve it.  I had a colleague once who would regularly stay late working on labs.  I’d stop by to see what he was up to and each time it was clear that he was the one who was really doing the lab.  All his students would do is turn on some apparatus and collect the numbers off the dials.  The effort to make nature answer a question we pose; that is a neat trick.  To go back to dancers and dances, I would ask how they could show whether there had been a change in weight when you added heat? They designed the approach.  And when they systematically would find that the water lost weight, they designed some follow up investigation that would try to control for evaporation.  It was a student, by the way, who suggested comparing equal volumes of hot and cold water.