Discovery
Learning
Teachers can’t give children “wonderful ideas”; children need
to discover or construct their own ideas. Developing new concepts or ideas is
an active process and usually begins with child-centered inquiry, which focuses
on the asking of questions relevant to the child. While inquiry involves a
number of science-related activities and skills, “the focus is on the active search for knowledge or understanding to
satisfy students’ curiosity”. Knowing the right answer, then, is not one of
the primary objectives of science in the early childhood curriculum. Duckworth
(1987) refers to “knowing the right answer” as a passive virtue and discusses
some of its limitations. “Knowing the right answer,” she says, “requires no
decisions, carries no risks, and makes no demands. It is automatic and
thoughtless. A far more important
objective is to help children realize that answers about the world can be
discovered through their own investigations. Sciencing, for example, involves coming up with
ideas of one’s own. Developing these ideas and submitting them to someone
else’s scrutiny is, according to Duckworth (1987), “a virtue in itself—unrelated to the rightness of the idea”.
Developing ideas of one’s own add breadth and depth to learning.
This is so, even if the child’s initial ideas are inaccurate views of the
world. Duckworth (1987) explains: “Any
wrong idea that is corrected provides far more depth than if one never had a
wrong idea to begin with. You master the idea much more thoroughly if you have
considered alternatives, tried to work it out in areas where it didn’t work,
and figured out why it was that it didn’t work, all of which takes time”.
Enjoy,
Ms. Nora Sierra
