# Presentation: 495382

## Strategies and Tools for Teaching

***Ilan Chabay***
***The New Curiosity Shop®***

- Elements 2002 Workshop

## Inquiry As Motivation and Process

**Provoke students’ or pose your own questions**
**Reflect process of doing science**
**Challenge your own and students’ current understanding**
**Awaken inherent curiosity as an intrinsic motivator**
**Use surprise -- “cognitive dissonances”**

## Cognitive Dissonance: An Example

- The Cart and The PendulumTM in Mirador, Santiago, Chile

**Notes:**
Swinging the pendulum with magnet over the cart with Cu plate on it results in the cart moving rapidly up and down the track. The cart follows the pendulum very closely.
If you switch plates on the cart and use a Cu plate with slots cut vertically in the plate, the cart does not move at all. The motion of the cart with Cu plate and the lack of motion with the slotted Cu plate are surprising and provoke questions for most people.

## Cognitive Dissonance: An Example

- The Cart and The PendulumTM in Mirador, Santiago, Chile

## Introducing New Ideas

**Focus on **_**few**_** most important concepts**
- Organize ideas into a coherent framework
- Identify fundamental ideas at core of concept
- Restate ideas in multiple ways
- Elaborate connections to students’ current level of understanding and knowledge
- Emphasize a deeper understanding of principles, process, and content

## Pre-existent Mental Models

**Build upon existing mental models of students -- so-called “naïve concepts”**
**Elicit descriptions of existing models**
**Focus on idea represented by models, rather than on choice of vocabulary**
**Point out common and distinct threads among models**
**Identify significant problems in current models**
**Alter or replace models explicitly by reference to observations, experiments, and theory.**

**Notes:**
Air pressure or boiling in PPPB: questions lead to experiments
Tiny green men in cup of green water and clear oil: Whimsy and humor has value, too.
Vocabulary: question about the “other stick”

## Complexity and Conceptual Layers

- Articulate all the major concepts encompassed by a complex idea
- Organize ideas in priority orders
- Create an strong model for the central idea
- Elaborate on secondary ideas in separate models
- Encourage exploration of major ideas and their implications

## Conceptual Layers in a Set of Models

- Giant Magnetic Disk DriveTM

## Conceptual Layers in a Set of Models

- Details of GMDD

## Conceptual Layers in a Set of Models

- Messing Up Data on the Giant Magnetic Disk DriveTM

## Conceptual Layers in a Set of Models

- Hidden DirectionsTM and Magnetic MediumTM

## Models, Representations, Simulations

- Consider models and simulations as a type of metaphors in science
- Use real phenomena when possible
- Real phenomena and objects have a profound impact
- Models using real phenomena have an inherent richness and are more open-ended
- Connect models and simulations to real events
- Discuss limitations of model -- what does it do and what doesn’t it do well
- Beware of facile manipulation of a model without significant understanding of its representation

## Models Are At the Core of Science

- Developing models
**Define the purpose of the model**
**Set criteria for design**
**Choose medium**
**Test to identify problems**
**Operational**
**Conceptual **
- Using models
**Develop a visual vocabulary for thinking**
**Observe emergence of patterns**
**Make and test predictions to check understanding**

- NASA Workshop on Origin of the Elements

- August 5, 2002