EDSS 531

Philosophy/Model Integration

Well, I have to say, it’s sort of obvious that I’ll choose Inductive Thinking and Scientific Inquiry as the educational models that fit my education philosophy which, you may recall, was perennialist as to content and existentialist as to process.  The reason I think it is obvious is that the most important skills of a Physicist are Inductive Thinking and Scientific Inquiry.  Discerning correlations and generalizing those correlations into causative hypotheses is the first job of the practicing Physicist.  And the second job is testing those hypotheses against reality and modifying them as necessary.  So, state standards notwithstanding, it is really those two models themselves that students of Physics most need to learn.  These two models need not be student-centered, which is to say existentialist, and both have been practiced in very teacher-centered educational environments in the past.  But both can be applied in student-centered ways and be very successful that way.  

We use Scientific Inquiry in the classroom whenever we have a discrepant event.  We ask the students to make a prediction based on their current understanding of nature, then test their prediction against reality and modify it accordingly.  The process is student-centered in that it is about their prediction, their experience and their conclusion, not that of the book or teacher.  Discrepant events are often billed as being just a way of generating cognitive dissonance for the purpose of highlighting a principle and making it more memorable, and they can have that effect.  But they are also valuable in developing the habit of open-mindedness; the ability to accept that one’s preconception may not be accurate.  So I see the Scientific Inquiry model as having the dual role of enhancing the acquisition of information-centered, perennially important knowledge as well as engendering in students certain thinking skills that will serve them later in life.

When you teach to the standard, except for those few points in the Investigation and Experimentation section, it’s mostly about understanding physical principles and applying them (and their appropriate formulas) to various problems or situations.  That’s largely a perennial approach.  It’s necessary to develop that skill, but it is not the same skill as that of recognizing relationships between isolated pieces of information or, more importantly, isolated principles.  I always come back to a lab commonly done in Physics 1.  It’s a reaffirmation of Newton’s second, not an inductive lab, but there is an anomaly that always appears as a result of friction.  As it happens, a graph that should go through zero has a finite y-intercept that exactly corresponds to the friction in the system and is easy to account for, if one notices it.  Very few students, however, notice it until and unless I point it out to them.  That, of course, is what I want to change.  I want my students to engage their own curiosity; to notice patterns, and exceptions to those patterns, for themselves, and to look for the meaning within them. 

In short, what I hope to be able to accomplish, at least a little, is for students to learn Physics the way Physicists practice physics:  Standing on the shoulders of giants, and imagining.