The Importance Of Getting Things Wrong

Basically, teach people by letting them think for themselves rather than being an authority figure.

"Students are not empty vessels," he says. "Students are full of all kinds of knowledge, and they have explanations for everything." From birth, human beings are working hard to figure out the world around us.

But we go about it more like the early Greek philosophers than modern scientists: reasoning from our limited experience. And like those early philosophers — Ptolemy comes to mind — we're often dead wrong. Sadler says that cognitive science tells us that if you don't understand the flaws in students' reasoning, you're not going to be able to dislodge their misconceptions and replace them with the correct concepts.

The first step, Sadler says, is to teach Socratically (there's the Greeks again), by asking questions and having students think out loud. This works much better than lecturing. "Teachers who find their kids' ideas fascinating are just better teachers than teachers who find the subject matter fascinating," he says.

The next step is to give students exposure to the information and experience that will enable them to reason their way to the right answer. For example, Sadler and colleagues created a high school astronomy course. In one of the lessons, students looked at pictures of the sun taken through the same telescope at each month of the year. Most predicted that the sun would appear larger in the hot months. However, once they got out the rulers, they would discover that the sun is biggest (i.e., closest) in January. (The closest point in our orbit, the "perihelion," was Jan. 2 this year.)

"That throws a monkey wrench into the logic of the elliptical orbit," says Sadler.

http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/08/01/481422876/the-importance-of-getting-things-wrong?sc=ipad&f=1001