Teaching for Conceptual Change: The Sweater Article

By teaching her children through experimentation of their own beliefs, Mrs. O'Brien did her students a service that isn't always an option for teachers and students. Her students learned a valuable lesson - that their ideas might be wrong - and how to actively problem solve in order to change their ideas. I really appreciate that the article pointed out Mrs. O'Brien's struggles to allow her students to test their theories and to hold her tongue when she wanted to introduce the "correct" answer to them. Even though she lost some valuable teaching time, she gave her students an opportunity to test theories, evaluate their theories and form new ones, and start all over again.

The article brings up several barriers to conceptual change - stubborness, language, perception and development. One of the things I learned from this is that these barriers are not going to be overcome by "teaching" students... you have to let the students teach themselves and each other. A stubborn child is less likely to give up their convictions if you try to feed them vocabulary and ideas that they aren't able to test on their own.

Teaching in this way is valuable for student learning, but unfortunately, it's probably not considered effective in terms of classroom time. The experiences the students did took time and even though the students eventually came to form a new, more correct idea about heat, Mrs. O'Brien allowed a lot of class time to come to those conclusions. This isn't always possible, so how, as teachers do we reconcile the need for student exploration and the time constraints of school curriculum expectations?