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please discover more about our newest
discrepant event lesson, on DVD.
Presentation about Discrepant Event Lesson:
Humanity's Journey
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Models of Teaching, example
Models of Teaching/Instruction
The teaching method used in the DVD movie lesson,
Discrepant Event Lesson: Humanity's Journey,
is based on the work of Bruce Joyce, Marsha Weils,
and Emily Calhoun.
Proceeds from the lesson film,
Discrepant Event Lesson: Humanity's Journey,
will go to The Bruce Cultural Diversity Scholarship.
The scholarship is also funded by a grant from the
Jean and Bill Bruce Foundation for the Empowerment
of Diversity Understanding (FEDU).
Humanity’s Journey
Question: What are America's best kept secrets?
Answers:
* teachers and power problem solving
* inquiry and democracy
* a diverse population
Teachers, from American's beginning, came to America from all over the world.
America's diversity, and the teachers' need for freedom
and fairplay, helped make America great.
The idea, of ideas, as power, helped make America great.
Power, in this new country, America, without domination,
helped make America great.
The ability, for anyone, to command his or her own life through observation, hands-on diagnosis, cooperation,
and open-minded inquiry, helped make America great.
A Revolution in Learning
by
Jean K. Bruce
Your Link to a FREE Discrepant Event Lesson at page bottom:
Lesson Title: The Articles
The Articles of Confederation
Taken from the best seller:
Mindtronics! and Inquiry Alive!
Professor William C. Bruce
Jean K. Bruce
Mindtronics! and Inquiry Alive!
William C. Bruce
Associate Dean and Professor
College of Education and Psychology
Phone: (903) 566-7048
e-mail: wbruce@uttyler.edu
http://www.hometreemedia.org
Fax: (903) 566-7036
Web Address of a " teacher must have" Power Point,
Discrepant events and inquiry teaching and learning remain some of the secret weapons behind America's success.
Many educators write and talk about discrepant events and inquiry, however, as if the two are the same. Although I coauthored several books about discrepant event inquiry with my husband, Professor William C. Bruce, I too, often drop the word inquiry from the discrepant event.
My husband continues to use the three words, discrepant event inquiry, for good reasons. Why?
Click below to see the following video:
Conversations with History: Science and Politics,
with Richard C. Lewontin
UCTV: UC Berkeley
59 min 26 sec
www.uctv.tv
Conversations with History host Harry Kreisler
talks with Richard C.Lewontin about scientific inquiry
and the role of science in public policy.
Why would some educators continue to use the three words, discrepant event inquiry?
The discrepant event is one element of the discrepant event inquiry process. The discrepant event usually conveys a puzzling situation or event, a short narrative story, or an account of something that happened, might have happened, or might happen in the future.
The Inquiry
The inquiry includes the orderly thought, action, and processes driven by you, the teacher, but ordinarily performed by your students. Your students ask questions, gather data, pose hypotheses, analyze information, synthesize answers, and draw tentative conclusions while constructing the best answer.
USS Enterprise, Constitution Class
Please tolerate the devices that come naturally to my mind, as I express my thoughts about discrepant event inquiry, power problem solving, and democracy.
No matter how many times I tell myself that I'm silly because I equate a discrepant event to Star Trek's USS Enterprise, my mind's eye persists in showing me the USS Enterprise, every time I think or write about discrepant events. You probably already know that one series of Starfleet vessels flew by the name Constitution Class, in the Star Trek series.
In case you forgot, exploration and diplomacy accounted for the Constitution class ships' main objective. Comparatively, to me, the discrepant event in a discrepant event inquiry lesson both anchors and launches a discrepant event inquiry lesson in place; the main objective is discovery. The discrepant event inquiry teaching method brings other rewards: cooperative rewards, students working with other students. Indeed, this teaching method could be thought of as learning the diplomatic skills of tact and mediation, too. Yep, I really think of each discrepant event as my mind's own USS Enterprise.
Phantom Ship of the Mind
The USS Enterprise, er ah, I mean discrepant event, provides stability for a jumping off place. The discrepant event might start off in your students' minds, as unreal as a cloaked, invisible space ship. Or your students might begin the lesson only slightly interested. The first interest your students show might appear purely because of the puzzling situation--the discrepancy in the event.
If your students have a hard time finding the discrepancy in the event, you're fighting an up hill battle. Then again, that's better than the fight-or-flight reaction many other teaching systems evoke. As your students move through the steps of detection during the inquiry, though, your students will eventually treat the discrepant event as the main source of motivation.
Door
Your students' interest level usually expands as they re-read the discrepant event's narrative event; each reading, typically, acts as a open door, another chance to pay attention to the event's details. The discrepant event's distinctive characteristics begin to improve. Why?
Judgment
"Good Judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment."
Your students realize, on many levels, that the discrepant event, be it fiction or real, sustains, maintains, and feeds information as they search (during inquiry) for answers that connect back to the discrepant event. Regardless of how interested your students become in the discrepant event phase, the discrepant event should remain less attractive than the inquiry phase.
Central Hub
The discrepant event creates a central hub of inquiry activities. The hub helps you direct the lesson, discreetly, to gain the desired result: applicable knowledge and insight. Think of the hub as the event's particular info, facts, data, and story.
Discoverers
The inquiry process takes off. Your students change into discoverers. The inquiry expands the investigation. The inquiry heats up the learning. The exploration usually resolves the discrepant event's mystery. The journey is the key. The USS Enterprise rarely overshadowed the Star Trek characters or the episodes. The inquiry outshines its vehicle.
Mission: To Boldly Go Where Minds have Never Gone Before
The inquiry part of a discrepant event lesson presents many ways for your students to exit the discrepant event to seek the undiscovered inquiry. While the discrepant event acts as the foundation, the inquiry compels. During the inquiry surge, your students turn into detectives, experimental scientists, and voyagers.
You will see your students' minds switch on. Similar to a gearwheel, or a toothed mechanical part, the inquiry process engages with other interlocking parts to transmit mind travel. When presented a discrepant event, your students' first views change about the discrepant event, from bystander to contributor, from perhaps somewhat patronizing to involved. You almost see the changes from low, to medium, to high gear; some teachers say to warp speed.
Your students target and pull together their awareness, ideas, experiences, knowledge, abstract reasoning, and scientific problem-solving skills into their own design of exactitude and precision. It's almost impossible to overly stress, that the discrepant event is toothless without its inquiry teeth.
Fudging
"In time you will stop fudging about your students' problem-solving skills and start bragging about them."
In the Star Trek series Voyager, the crew had to avoid conflict and defeat challenges on their risky journey home. When using the discrepant event inquiry approach, students try to defeat all challenges; but they should look for conflict. As a Star Trek character once said, "Infinite diversity in infinite combinations.""
Fudging?
Fix
Note: If I use one more Star Trek
word crutch, I promise to sign up for AA: Androids Anonymous.
People performing a countless number of tasks often problem solve their way out of discrepancies, by using the analytical steps in inquiry. A discrepancy might come indirectly from an ordinary event in your life. Has this ever happened to you? You had your car tuned-up yesterday, but today it's dead. In your own life, do you experience some of the following?
inconsistencies
differences in opinions
contradictions
opposition
denial
dissent
disclaimers
divergent disagreements
Vulcan Mind Meld Chant
"My mind to your mind...my mind to your mind."
Outside the classroom too, any person with a problem must submit mind and method to matter (matter being the subject of the problem), to solve the problem. When humans need to smooth the progress of their job, or to find meaningful answers, we need to be able to problem solve from scratch.
Ready-made answers frequently rot the mind. We tackle the removal of our problems' barriers. We break through to inspect and follow paths of investigative research. We make inquires until we form a clear theory to clarify the facts. Then we apply what we learned. Inquiry seems so familiar, but we glibly overlook its magnificence.
Vulcan, Mr. Spock
Limitless Possibilities
The limitless possibilities of inquiry bring me to democracy, its magnificence, and its relationship to discrepant event inquiry. Democracy. Yep, use discrepant events for inquiry and discovery. Use inquiry also for democracy.
One too many Epiphanies and other Intuitive Leaps?
Do you think much about democracy? Try living without it for one day. Fall in love with democracy. I'm not writing about some perfect state of harmony. Love democracy enough to use it in your classroom, daily.
Do your students work in a democratic structure, or under strict, absolute school and classroom rules that cause repression? Do your students feel the free and equal right, to participate, within an environment safe enough to express their views?
Sign Outside a Church: Don't give up. Moses was once a basket case.
Do your students feel oppressed inside your classroom? What hope could students cling to for a fair world outside the classroom if rules, procedures, and social ladders inflict injustice, inside the classroom?
Biggest Discrepant Event Lesson of all Time
Albert Einstein
"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
Recall, in the early years of America's development few people knew much anywhere in the world about how to make a democracy work. The puzzle of how to make America a true democracy was the biggest discrepant event lesson of all time.
As you know, the people in the colonies wishing independence from Britain looked for ways to solve their problems. Breaking away from Britain and establishing a new country sat at the top, in the beginning, of their "to-do" list.
1776
Thomas Paine talked and wrote against Britain and the dominant kingdom form of control, in "Common Sense." With his pamphlet, titled "Common Sense," Thomas Paine brought scores of undecided people to the cause of independence.
Thomas Reid, 1710-1796, became the chair of Moral Philosophy in 1764, at the University of Glasgow. Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith had once held that position there, too. Reid emerged as a luminary in Europe and America for his democratization of the intellect. Thomas Paine's friend Benjamin Rush urged Tom Paine to use Thomas Reid's catchword, Common Sense, as the title in Paine's pamphlet for independence.
Click below for the video:
Tom Paine's Bones
Dick Gaughan
Dick Gaughan sings about the
American revolution.
The Library of Congress
American Memory
The Constitutional Convention
Supporters of the Constitution Federalists—and opponents of the Constitution—Antifederalists—fought fiercely in the press. Seventy-seven essays, written anonymously by "Publius," appeared in New York newspapers, explaining and defending the new Constitution. These essays, published in book form with eight additional essays, were titled The Federalist. Written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. The Federalists turned out to be the most organized and coherent effort to defend the Constitution.
1787 and the Second Founding
From the American Constitution surfaced many perplexing inventions. One strange concept was the American Supreme Court.
James Wilson, a Pennsylvania delegate, kept the lines of communication open with one of his favorite topics, the common sense philosophy of Thomas Reid. Wilson used the common sense philosophy to help sort out the problems arising from James Madison's federalist proposals.
Picture your students as delegates to the first and second Constitutional Conventions. If that notion seems a scary thought to you, start using discrepant event inquiry lessons, today.
Click on the link below to see the video:
Second American Revolution: George Grant (5 of 7)
American Independence Formed the First Founding American
Nationhood Brought the Second Founding
"The first Constitution had only outlined in purposely-ambiguous theory, thereby opening up and closing off options for all the history that followed.
Defenders of the Constitution, then and now, have saluted it as a sensible accommodation of liberty to power and a realistic compromise with the requirements of a national domain. That has turned out, over time, to be correct, though at the time, even the advocates were not sure.
...The basic framework for all these institutions and traditions was built in a sudden spasm of enforced inspiration and makeshift construction during the final decades of the eighteenth century." (Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, by Joseph J. Ellis, Library of Congress subject headings for this publication: Statesmen United States Biography Anecdotes, Presidents United States Biography Anecdotes, United States History 1783-1815 Anecdotes.)
George Washington, a Vulcan?
Try to think of yourself as a time traveler. You are now one of the "movers and shakers" in the colonies. You are, at least in part, responsible for turning the colonies into a country: America.
James Madison became a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
Should the title of father of the Constitution go to Madison?
Madison helped promote the virtues of a strong central government.
Madison
The Group
In those first twelve years or so of America's uphill struggle, of all the people involved in making our country, the "group" earned most of our gratitude.
Individuals, with self-interests and egos as varied as we see presently all around us, separated much of their "privileged" nature. Some Constitutional Convention delegates owned rigid dispositions; they thought and acted authoritarian. Have you ever witnessed this kind of behavior in some of your students? The group of delegates, however, finally embraced much of their altruistic nature. They had learned from ancient and recent history that self-interest steers society. Thank goodness, they also learned that advantages, somehow, must find equal distribution. If disadvantages fall on certain groups unfairly, especially if due to governmental actions or lack of governmental actions, the injustice causes a collective imbalance that weakens all the people.
The individual delegates to the Constitutional Convention, we all know, formed a formidable group. The group effort researched and managed the tricky and thorny tasks of finding constitutional liberties that stood impartial. They carried it off, eventually, with dispassionate and fair judgments.
The group effort, then, as in many inquiry lesson classrooms the world over, nowadays, proves relentlessly persistent and effective. Inquiry generates power problem solving. Decisions by hard working negotiations and compromise drawn from lines of investigation outshine any one person, yesterday or today, whether the group works in government or in a classroom.
The methods you use for teaching and learning are probably based on decision-making processes and principles. How much latitude do you allow your students? Discrepant event inquiry requires plenty of latitude.
Click on the link below to see the video:
Gordon Wood - Revolutionary Characters
National Constitution Center
1 hr 8 min 49 sec - May 31, 2006
www.constitutioncenter.org
America's Founders used the Scientific Inquiry Process
Educators had been successful in Scotland in proving that the scientific approach to problem solving brought better results, than other less logical methods. The new methods of scientific inquiry helped support the human advancement to higher levels of civilization. The accuracy and thoroughness gained by chemists, biologists, or inventors, plainly defined and enlightened any subject. The scientific process of inquiry equates negatively today, however, in some minds, as in the minds of skeptics and opponents of open assessment in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Analyzing questions and using scientific investigative strategies seem a threat to some people. America's Founders endured a similar kind of disapproval from those wishing to unduly influence government, as some teachers endure by using problem solving inquiry, today.
Could democracy be a key realization to keep in mind, each day before you talk to your students? It's a blessing we need to keep foremost in our minds, because we live in a free, democratic society.
Sometimes, America carries out ideas that end up as wrong; yet we resolve our problems through questions and formal investigations to determine facts: inquiry. More people have believed throughout history that it's much easier to rule through a dictatorship. Teachers are usually an exception to the rule.
Click on the link below to see the video:
Gordon Wood - The Americanization
of Benjamin Franklin
National Constitution Center
59 min 20 sec
www.constitutioncenter.org
Ben Franklin: one of the greatest scientific minds of his era
Special Today
A teacher used discrepant event inquiry regularly in her classroom. Students hung a sign on the door of her classroom: Special Today: Inquiry.
Big D
The methods in discrepant event inquiry extend our minds profoundly more than the boundaries of mere question and answer techniques. When you're not thinking of the USS Enterprise, when you're thinking of discrepant events, do you think of the "d" in discrepant event inquiry as standing for DEMOCRACY?
With democracy in your classroom, with democracy in your discrepant event inquiry, you will see your students' common sense exchanges export far beyond the classroom.
The democracy, in inquiry, exerts and joins the spread and cause of ideas and values among your students. You will find that the best force, inquiry, for student problem solving is evidenced by your student's motivation, reflection, reasoning, and judgment. Yet, making sense of experience and the resulting influences of a student's own behavior, development, actions, and powers of persuasion comes first.
The Age of Enlightenment
Do you consider the European Enlightenment an intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries? Many scholars believe that the Enlightenment's intellectual movement began in Scotland. People thought that Scotland presented an unexpected place for Enlightenment. Apparently, many people misjudged, the people of Scotland.
An independent intellect linked with an assertive self-worth, secured by a strong sense of honorable purpose: the American teacher. What was the foundation of democratic-minded American schools? Teaching developed, partly, from the Enlightenment.
"Beam me up Scotty."
A sequence of well thought-out disciplines, taught and passed on, derived from the Scottish Enlightenment. The Scottish Enlightenment changed every branch of learning. A new insight into humans and society came from the Scottish Enlightenment.
Clashing Ideas
During the Enlightenment, students wanted to learn, great thinkers of the day realized, when given responsibility, and the authority and freedom to make decisions. The great thinkers thought and taught that knowledge is power and that the way to knowledge was through experience.
Thomas Reid taught and convinced our Founders, indirectly, that knowledge belonged to everyone, regardless of any other attributes. Reid wrote about human progress. Human progress depended on expanding the degree of knowledge for any person. Many people called Reid's teachings, a science of human freedom. School, teaching, and knowledge, Reid believed, could change a person, and change the world.
However, these big ideas clashed, as you know, in America, too. The engines of opposing and attracting elements constantly ran into each other. People globaly shared conflicted emotions about the Enlightenment's ideas.
Dance
"Those who dance are considered insane by those who cannot feel the music."
Just after the Continental Congress had finished making its revisions to the Declaration, July 4, 1776, a delegate heard a conversation between Benjamin Harrison of Virginia and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts.
Benjamin Harrison said: "I shall have a great advantage over you, Mr. Gerry, when we are all hung for what we are now doing. From the size and weight of my body I shall die in a few minutes, but from the lightness of your body you will dance in the air an hour or two before you are dead."
When your students use discrepant event inquiry methods to power problem solve in your classroom, they never have to worry, as the delegates to the Continental Congress worried. Students working in your class, most likely, will never have to worry about the enemy hauling them out of class to a necktie party to dance at the end of a rope.
The Enlightenment Democratized Knowledge
Faith, in the powers and rights to educate, to enlighten, and to liberate collided with the ideas that we should hold a skeptical distrust of human motives. The ideas supporting the Enlightenment democratized knowledge—the ideas supporting emphasized reason and individualism rather than tradition. Thomas Reid believed that certain truths are "self-evident." Self-evident truths carry "the light of truth itself." The philosophy of common sense that Thomas Reid taught shaped American theories of education up until today.
As written earlier, Reid taught at the University of Glasgow. Reid's ideas helped prepare us to see real human potential. The kind of independent intellect and assertive self-respect, linked with a strong sense of purpose, were traits Reid and America's Founders shared.
The Enlightenment strengthened our Founders' beliefs, that humans had rather lead constructive lives than deconstructive and, could be trusted to govern themselves partly because of that reason. Books from the Scottish Enlightenment impacted America's Founders, for instance the following: A Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759, Adam Smith, and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, 1776.
Theorems
Adam Smith asks us, in his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, to think of the following fundamental questions: Why do we regard certain actions or intentions with approval and condemn others? Is the only standard of right and wrong from our laws and rulers? Or can we work out ethical principles rationally, like the theorems of mathematics?
"Scotland reaped the economic benefits of free trade within the British Empire together with the intellectual benefits of having established Europe's first public education system since classical times. Under these twin stimuli, Scottish thinkers began questioning assumptions previously taken for granted; and with Scotland's traditional connections to France, then in the throes of the Enlightenment, the Scots began developing a uniquely practical branch of humanism to the extent that Voltaire said, 'We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilization.'"
System of Moral Philosophy
Author: Francis Hutcheson
The Enlightenment
"Virtue brings the greatest good to the most people."
"David Hume is arguably the most important thinker in the Scottish Enlightenment; Hume's moral philosophy eventually triumphed over Hutcheson's, and his investigations into political economy inspired his friend Adam Smith to more detailed work. Hume was largely responsible for giving the Scottish Enlightenment its practical hue, for he was concerned with the nature of knowledge, and developed ideas related to evidence, experience, and causation. Much of that is incorporated in the scientific method, and many modern attitudes toward the relationship between science and religion, were developed by him.
The Scottish Enlightenment thinkers developed a "science of man," which built upon Hume's work in the field of moral philosophy and his studies of human nature. It was expressed historically in works by major Scottish thinkers such as James Burnett, Adam Ferguson, John Millar, and William Robertson, all of whom merged a scientific study of how humans behave in ancient and primitive cultures with a strong awareness of the determining forces of modernity."
Do you think that an American teacher embraces the responsibility for our American way of freedom and justice, more than a Supreme Court Judge? American's Supreme Court "the jury of the country," is thought to be one of America's most democratic institutions. A Supreme Court Judge makes judgments about the world, in substance of fact, about right and wrong, and about reality and deception.
Communal thinking, to solve complex problems, to collect intelligence, and produce problem solving powers, has become a term and strategy for knowledge management in company's worldwide; they label "communal thinking" as a ground-breaking thought-generation method.
Communal Thinking in Businesses
Communal thinking in businesses is accepted, now, as a fresh way to understand:
1. the framework for knowledge management
2. how to investigate, extract and secure knowledge
3. how to plan, recognize, and analyze the role of knowledge
4. how to invent a project generated by mutual knowledge
5. how to put together an action plan to build the right infrastructure to support knowledge sharing in the organization.
Two vs. One
Do you think that communal thinking matches discrepant event inquiry? Happily, inquiry teachers have long realized that communal thinking strengthens student abilities to power problem solve. Yet, the idea is so simple and natural it scares people.
To finish reading this section
Click on: Two vs. One
The U.S. Supreme Court, as other powerful institutions, establishes its look of authority, partially today, with icons and identifiable architecture. What if teachers owned such power icons?
Imagine if your school furnished you with stationary resembling official Supreme Court Justice stationery. When you sent messages home to parents with such impressive stationery, would parents react differently?
How would society treat teachers if all schools looked somewhat like the Supreme Court building? If all schools possessed majestic architectures, how would it change attitudes to teachers? What if teachers made equivalent pay, as say, judges?
John Marshall
Due to a series of forceful, well-argued decisions issued by his Court, John Marshall facilitated the creation of a unified body of constitutional doctrines. Marshall helped America establish its national authority and its Supreme Court authority, through his comprehensive communal thinking.
The members of the Supreme Court engaged in group problem solving. If John Marshall lived today, what would he think of teacher pay? It's a pretty safe bet that he would approve of discrepant event inquiry.
How many of your students come to mind when you think about your students becoming Supreme Court Judges? With students using power problem-solving methods, American improves her chances that other Supreme Court Chief Justices, even better than John Marshall, will lead us in our future.
John Marshall
In Hot Water with Your Favorite Referee?
A teacher's classroom must work. A teacher's classroom must work within the borders of a certain amount of freedom and justice, though the subjects they teach are probably something other than government.
Teachers live under great expectations. Teachers feel obliged to stimulate thought, curiosity, interface with different topics, meet standards, keep the communication flowing, test, analyze, evaluate, judge, AND referee.
Post-Revolutionary War Temps
Do you ever wonder about teachers in our early days after the Revolutionary War? The defection rate among teachers in the Colonial era exceeded 95 percent within 5 years after entry into teaching. Temporary work was how most educators described being a teacher.
Most Post Revolutionary War teachers were men
Déjà vu
Today, many people believe that teacher shortages are a new problem. Historical evidence proves that a majority of teachers in early America changed professions just after the age of twenty. Young teachers wrote on their exit papers: "The pay was too low, the work brief and seasonal, and other economic opportunities were too great." Sound familiar to you?
"...There is reason to believe that many of the masters who built long-term careers in teaching were largely captives of the occupation. That is, in contrast with other fields open to them, teaching was a haven that offered them some degree of social mobility. A powerful colonial tradition bestowed public service jobs, such as teaching, grave digging and bell ringing, on social dependents that had few employment opportunities." (Rury, 1989; Sedlak, 1989; Sedlak and Schlossman, 1986).
Our Founding Fathers and Mothers, despite all their hardships, knew that new ideas must be worthy of consideration when teaching students in our freedom-hungry country.
Liberty and Authority
Americans believed in protecting property. Yes, but unique to this land the idea survived that society could devise beneficial strategies to channel passions in constructive, practical directions. How? Liberty.
The post-Revolutionary War Americans, at first, asked, "Will our new country allow me freedom? Can I truly follow my own self-interest? Will America form a fair-minded, balanced system of law enforcement?" Soon, Americans voiced their expectations loud and clear: "We demand freedom, not just from Britain, but from other oppressions and tyranny."
The American courts generated cohesion and strength. The American courts determined to "punish transgressors, to correct fraud and violence," yet America's courts shunned treading on liberties. Two standards brought life and unity. Liberty and authority.
Liberty Bell
What Would a Constitution Class Starship do without Liberty?
Our American Founders realized that winning liberty was simpler than keeping it. Do we take the status of the decision-making process of educators seriously any more? Do we take the status of parents, and students, and the rights of teachers to use inquiry methods in their classrooms seriously?
Do we fully realize, today, that keeping liberty in our schools remains a continual conflict? Or will we buckle under to those concerned mainly with higher test scores, instead of power problem-solving skills?
Altruistic Ideas
In our country's infancy, American leaders guessed rightly that a truly democratic society would always seem imperfect; it would always ride on a bumpy, experimental road. An American teacher needed to hold up a mirror, figuratively speaking, after the Revolution, to his or her self, but allow it to reflect back the reactions of students, in place of his or her reflection, and let the student reaction be the guide.
That altruistic idea alone, for a teacher in the 18th century, heated up the imagination. Happiness at the expense of others had long been the tune of the times.
Cat Mountain: Imagination?
Brain Lock
A Teacher announced to his
class:
"I have good news and bad
news.
The good news is, you have
enough
sense to solve these problems.
The bad news is, you've locked
down your brain."
Since our Revolutionary War days we've learned to adjust our disruptive fervor accordingly, for our democratic society. We deal with civil difficulties through means other than revolt. We think about our emotions more. We try to express ourselves constructively. Glory be, though, we're probably safe, these days, if we show our emotions.
Did America win the Revolution just because we had better soldiers? We won because we defended the ultimate need: freedom. Many of those fighting the British, and many new to early American, knew more than they wanted to know about lack of freedom.
Mother Goose Peddlers or Reluctant Heroes?
Many teachers must deal with a lack of freedom in their classrooms. Teachers form intellectual detachment partly because of their honesty and sincerity.
Instead of judging students and their actions by cold calculations, as teachers are often judged, teachers sometimes indirectly and sometimes directly, yesteryear and today, teach their students about independence and equality, by setting good examples.
Ironically, teachers teach their students to stop needing teachers. In essence, teachers vigorously undercut their own value for the sake of their students, and, intuitively, for the sake of our self-governing society. Yet, too many of us see teachers as somewhere between Mother Goose peddlers and reluctant heroes.
What Would Inquiry Tell us about Klingons?
While the United States remains a powerful force, and our interest in finances ranks high in importance, teachers enlighten us and civilize us so we know how to communicate and make American growth possible. In spite of this, teachers are too busy teaching and trying to make ends meet to ponder the fact that their teaching functions as a service to their country.
Teachers, especially those teachers using inquiry, help us keep the worthy fabric of our society intact. Teachers protect us from our enemies and from civil revolt by increasing the depth and breath of our problem solvers' integrated intellect. Teachers often teach in decrepit buildings, in crowded classrooms, to students that hang onto the teacher's every word.
Do your students seldom listen to you? Would your students change if you earnestly strived to bring them discrepant event inquiry? Would you change?
The Strongest Link
Teachers today rarely need to be all things to all people with responsibilities to students of every age, as they were in postcolonial days; or do they? Teachers still carry our cultural current and its civic pride. Teachers salvage and recycle our egalitarian joy.
So far, the average citizen seems overly aware of a teacher's faults. The average citizen often acts ungrateful and shows more gratitude to their babysitters than to their child's teacher. Yet, teachers operate as synthesizers of the daily reality of our democracy.
We exist as free Americans, deeply indebted to our teachers. Yesterday, they did more than their part to make democracy prevail. Today, they still do more than their part to make democracy endure.
Defiance
What would happen to the United Sates if we lost our teachers or muzzled them? First, we would have to drop the word "United" from United States.
If Americans demanded more rights suppose, to health insurance, and our leaders tried to hang on to the status quo and stop the health insurance movement by using their powers, the outcome might be defiance. Defiance, in America, means voting out leaders that stand in the way of our liberty and the progress and good health of the people.
Did the Borg have Self-interest?
Adults hardly need an inquiry lesson to know that before the American Colonies won their freedom, the obligation for colonial reform and the dodging of colonial mutiny, fell to Britain's rulers and their Parliament. When a teacher uses an inquiry lesson to teach students about why America revolted against Britain, the students quickly discover that the British Parliament existed by feudalism, a dependence on their colonies, and their own self-interests.
Borgs owned zero self-interest
The Tea Tax was Only the Tip of the Iceberg
Imagine if Britain's teachers had been allowed to teach, more than the basics, to all their children. What if Britain's teachers had been allowed to teach by using higher level thinking skills, before the American Revolution?
What if Britain's teachers and students had been allowed more inclusive responsibilities? What if all Brits had owned the universal right to vote? Would Britain have been ready for the modern age, where people dared to self govern? Would Britain have been ready for the reform of her colonies and for her own institutions and people?
Dark Ages
"An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see."
Charles Dickens shows us his Britain and his countrymen in his stories. Through his books, he illustrates the sort of "Dark Age" that neglect and exploitation brought less protected people.
Dickens and other writers of his time impressed on their readers, the attitude of Britain's rulers: disregard for all but the powerful. The lack of autonomy happened in Britain and most of the world during the time the American Colonies were justifiably protesting against English rule.
For the People and by the People
After the colonist won their freedom from Britain, they wanted to avoid the Machiavellian, inflexible, or predatory behavior that caused a need to revolt. Our Founders believed that a just constitutional structure could reform better than revolt could reform.
Our Founders thought that the Constitution must maintain steely principles. Those principles must require strong and impartial government to both attract and repel lopsided power. The controlling powers must keep a frame sensitive enough to work for the people and by the people.
Click below to see the video:
The Americanization
of Benjamin Franklin
Gordon Wood
National Constitution Center
59 min 20 sec
www.constitutioncenter.org
Once upon a midnight dreary, someone whispered, "No more inquiry lessons, Deary."
Inquiry lessons help teachers and
students.Inquiry frees minds and
broadens America's supportive base.Inquiry supports our constitutional core and purpose.The more we support a teacher's power
to motivate student humanity and inquiry, the closer we come to protecting our
beloved democracy.
impartiality
self-restraint
support of thoughtful views
and censure of narrow views, given circumstances
Discrepant event inquiry teaches pride with humility. It teaches a sense of community. It teaches a sense of real Americanism. It teaches less conformity, yet more self-respect. It rewards independence, yet curbs excessive individualism, without polarizing. It increases interest in free enterprise and teamwork.
Discrepant event inquiry lessons teach students to weigh events and people fairly. Students gain respect due to their inquiry experience. Students grow in reliability and knowledge. Students acquire the guts to make decisions.
Justice
Given that the "majority" can be wrong and that a quality inquiry will probably result in effective discovery and solutions, many students using inquiry tend to make their decisions as our Founders made their decisions: for the good of the majority. This fortunate and observable factor happens in our classrooms only with the kind of treatment and evaluation that stands on justice.
Making decisions, for the good of the majority, ensues, though, after student collaboration, even if it might hamper the students' own self-interests. This paradox of independent self-sacrifice rocked the boat teachers stood on since the beginning of America.
Note: Naturally, I'm writing, here, more about the decision-making process, than whether the students' answers will result in precisely correct solutions to an inquiry lesson. I'm also writing about the atmosphere needed for students to think and act candidly during an inquiry lesson without having to conform needlessly. It's difficult to overly stress the need for an open classroom atmosphere, with free access to collaborate and to research. Preconceived attitudes about a student's abilities places great strain on the student's capacity to fully use inquiry successfully.
Scales of Justice
P-O-S-S-I-B-L-E
Americans, in our newly born, pioneering democracy dreamed that their teachers' duties and decisions would
reflect something sandwiched between a family doctor and Supreme Court Judge.
Is such a teacher possible?
Is democracy possible?
Not without democratic values in action, intense support, and checks and balances.
Shock
In early American schools, new
pedagogies slowly emerged.The
latest, more scientific pedagogies helped to enable teachers to shape the
school setting.The new attitudes
could protect and guide students instead of shocking them with images of
hellfire, or physically controlling them.
Snobs?
Families changed after 1940. Families sported an awareness of the professional-class in American.
The professional families brought new problems for American teachers. Many parents now considered their education superior to the education of a teacher.
The educated parents believed their education allowed them to attack the abilities of their children's teachers. Parents became less supportive of teachers without investing time to understand a teacher's job to his or her many other students. (Lanier & Little, 1985; Sedlak, 1989; Warren, 1985).
Teaching, as the great Greek independent thinkers knew, presents more interacting factors and complex issues than any other job. At the heart of teaching flows a feedback loop. Good teaching, we've come to expect, is a support-centered effort.
The energy from that support-centered struggle must activate student motivation. That energy must consider the students' individuality, views, spirit, persona, experience, knowledge, and potential, including all the elements of the curriculum, supervisors, administrators, legislators, and parents.
Teaching survives as a human service job. Teaching demands more responsibility, per student, than most people will ever have to sustain accountability for in their lifetime.
School Feminization Turned off Male Leaders
After 1940, do you find it surprising that historians and labor economists began to explore connections between so-called bad teaching, due to the feminization of schools? Historians found that America's explicit initiatives seemed to have been set up to "deskill" and restrict teachers from using their professional judgment and skills. The initiatives look similar to the so-called use of "teacher-proof" curricula.
"By the 1940s, women held more teaching positions than men. Were women bringing too much humanity and group decision-making to schools? Managers began to “bureaucratize, deskill, and routinize to minimize the role of workers and administrative personnel in the system.” (Work, Gender, and Teaching, Michael W. Apple, 1983).
Friends in Low Places
Behaviorally-specified
curriculum, prepackaged programs, and repeated testing and accountability
measures represent attempts by state governments and by male administrators to
wrest control of instruction from a largely female corps of teachers.
___ James Willis
"Rules can never describe life; they can only set the limits." James Willis
Willis, an experienced general practitioner, believes
that the State is increasingly controlling public services with a new kind of
authoritarianism, in search of a utopia that will not be achieved. He stands up
for those in the front line of public services—teachers, nurses, general
practitioners—who relate face-to-face with their patients and clients. He
believes this is an essentially human process, and that the judgment of
front-line professionals is being progressively eroded by a modern management
more concerned with models and measurable outcomes than with a caring service.
Much of his book is a polemic against management, with its models, rules and
timesheets.
Willis considers that management is essentially
impersonal and does not relate directly to individuals in need. Instead of
evidence-based medicine, which he dislikes for similar reasons, he calls for an
understanding-based medicine that takes into account the patient's personality
and feelings. He judges that, if professional men and women are deprived of
their independence, medicine will lose diversity, flair and richness: loss of
independence takes away ‘an essential element of what it means to be a doctor’.
The bottom line is trust, an old-fashioned word but still with modern meaning.
He contrasts the power and potential of the human mind with the limitations of
machines, even modern ones (Apple, 1995;
Clifford, 1989, Friends in Low Places).
From the Last Chapter of Friends in Low Places
"There is something beyond our brave, new, proxy,
second-hand, virtual reality which is what it’s all about. Some vital
ingredient which turns the game into life, but which is invisible, can’t be
pinned down, can’t be defined, can’t be controlled, can’t be demanded –
can’t be replaced. And it is down here, in the low places of life."
____James Willis
Man: A Course of Study
Jerome S. Bruner
Man: A Course of Study
Bruner's book helped teachers develop skills to the point of perfection. Bruner believed that any student can learn any material, provided that it is made suitable to the student's maturity/ability level. During the last third of the nineteenth century teachers found that tighter administrative control, the push for memory testing of students, nonintellectual teaching methods, and warden-like management limited teaching skills and endangered educator recruitment.
Modifying Process, Jerome S. Bruner
To modify process, activities must be restructured to be more intellectually demanding. For example, students need to be challenged by questions that require a higher level of response or by open-ended questions that stimulate inquiry, active exploration, and discovery. Although instructional strategies depend on the age of the students and the nature of the disciplines involved, the goal is always to encourage students to think about subjects in more abstract and complex ways. Activity selection should be based on student interests, and activities should be used in ways that encourage self-directed learning. Bloom's TAXONOMY OF EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES (1956) offers the most common approach to process modification. His classification system moves from more basic levels of thought, such as memory or recall, to more complex levels of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Parnes (1966), Taba (1962), and others have provided additional models for structuring thinking skills. Every teacher should know a variety of ways to stimulate and encourage higher level thinking skills. Group interaction and simulations, flexible pacing, and guided self-management are a few of the methods for managing class activities that support process modification. (Jerome S. Bruner, Modifying Process).
Real Freedom
Teachers, in our newly free American, struggled. Yet, on the whole teachers soon learned about how to weigh the facts better. As teachers began to leave out politics and offer more secular scrutiny, it permitted a more egalitarian opportunity for students.
Teachers learned to present ideas using clearer, more down-to-earth common sense based on practicality than irrelevant reasons. Teachers learned to render opinions and judgments with fewer prejudices.
Early in our country's history (and today), people worldwide dreamed about coming to America, a real place where real freedom lived. Freedom lived less in some corners than other corners. At least, though, freedom and a democratic attitude was expected or anticipated in schools. Why?
Self-governing
You have heard people say that democracy is a living, breathing body.
Picture democracy as a human body.
What would it look like?
What would you feed it to make it breathe?
Write democracy a letter.
Dear Democracy:
Who are you? Who were your parents?
When and where were you born?
Do you favor the Statue of Liberty?
What do you need to survive?
Best wishes,
An Admirer
Baron de Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat
Montesquieu was born in 1689, in Bordeaux, and died 1755. Montesquieu became known as a French social political intellectual. Montesquieu contributed to the Enlightenment with his beliefs in the separation of governmental powers theory. Many scholars named Montesquieu as the person that made the following terms handy for the public: feudalism and Byzantine Empire.
Montesquieu described how he thought governments would possibly find safety from fraud and failure if the organizational bodies existed, connected, but by the same general rules of law. He named the different governmental bodies, the legislative, the executive, and the judicial.
Montesquieu, showed us, in his book, "Spirit of the Law, 1748, that he thought that if the colonies attempted to make a national government beyond the Mississippi, liberty would be doomed. Do you think the Constitution framers took a look at his theories?
Our early teachers learned to teach America's principles of freedom. Our Founders believed passionately in the idea that common folk lived lives full of integrity. People believed that this colony could be the hope of the world. Some of those early colonists must have thought about liberty as a living possibility.
Liberty lights up the human mind. Sometimes it seems sad that we're the only animals that think about liberty, freedom, and integrity.
If the Statue of Liberty turned human, and she strictly identified her every thought with liberty, she might feel starved for the reason she exists: liberty.
Ms. Liberty might ask, "Where are all the united people—I mean united to resolve problems together and to accomplish self-governing goals?" Ms. Liberty parades down to the first school she sees. Ms. Liberty tells the speechless custodian behind the locked school door, "Teachers were strong ships for democracy, I seem to recall, in our earlier history."
Ms. Liberty spots posters along the walls of the school; she reads the words emblazed on the posters: Vote Tomorrow. Ms. Liberty asks, "Teachers remain, today, transporters for democracy? But what's the true state of your liberty?"
Thinking of freedom?
Building Blocks for Democracy
Teachers in early America might have expressed little faith in their students, in the beginning, but learned that their students could figure things out when given a chance. Many teachers were leaders in the Revolution and in the writing of the Constitution.
Have any documents in history stood as much study as the American Declaration of Independence and the Constitution? Protecting the “natural rights” of citizens leaped to life as a new theory of government: a government expected and required to carry out protection.
Did teachers back then understand, better than many others, that students in this liberated land must be trusted to do the right thing? Teachers encouraged students to "take part" in community decisions. Teachers reached out to our Founders. America's Founders reacted to the teachers. Teachers, people understood, must understand the fundamental building blocks for democracy to pass it on.
Good Neighbor Nation
Our post-Revolutionary War teachers dove into the deep end of the swirling river of change. Teachers soon grasped that our democracy "delivery service" must include the student as knower, as evaluator, and judge.
Teachers helped establish the idea that for the good of a beleaguered yet free nation, the country needed to produce students that could think on the fly. Teachers saw that students must use their own senses and grab hold of the facts.
Students had to understand right and wrong for the majority while weighing an individual's liberties. Many students needed to learn fast, and for the good of all, to recognize when he or she had to intervene and engage in an issue.
An astounding bright era of assistance took hold in American: neighbor-helped neighbor. Often, neighbor-helped neighbor regardless of class, nationality, or religion. Sadly, we would have to wait for more tolerance of Native Americans, women, and other ethnic groups.
Tower of Babel
How could a teacher in early America teach, influence, and involve their students democratically, shaping students for a self-ruled future when few people knew much about democracy? How could a teacher teach students arriving from the world over?
How could a teacher teach students when the parents carried baggage as old as hate and prejudice? How could a teacher succeed when an expanding country like America had to learn to rule autonomously, act class consciously, and do it all without impenetrable stalemates and standoffs?
Constitutional Migraine
The best way, perhaps the only way, our county's democratic counterbalancing powers could evade incurable gridlock would be if the people making our Constitution had agreed on self-evident truths. They agreed. Our Constitution remains the ideal example for its complex design and counteracting of interests and dedication to fundamental truths.
In finding certain fundamental truths, our Founders could trust their own judgment; they could trust the judgment of others to succeed in a "finding of the middle ground." Many of our Founders families had recently fled from British rule; they arrived familiar with the need and worth of finding an intermediate position between opposing views or factions.
Many teachers came from countries with little or no democracy. These immigrants knew that common sense must reign instead of one person reigning; these teachers drooled over the idea of practicing democracy.
Domino Effect
America's early Supreme Court Judges, lawmakers, and the general population realized that if teachers failed to teach democratically, America's self-government would fail. The entire basis of rule in our laws requires that the ordinary people understand our laws. The better ordinary people understand and practice democracy daily, the better our chances for it to last, and for it to work.
Blessing or a Curse?
Teachers as well as Constitutional Convention delegates strived for plain and straightforward language so parents and students could read and understand what teachers and delegates were teaching. Similar to our American Supreme Court Judges, however, teachers could be and can be today, a blessing or a curse.
Puzzle
Regardless of what you teach, the democracy in discrepant events should help you and your students act, comparatively, something also close to a social anthropologist. The discrepancy in each event reconnects students to the American way of relentless inquiry.
Decisions: The Final Frontier
Anywhere in the world, a teacher's mind broadens in his or her understanding of classroom democracy thanks to an inquiry's style of teaching and learning. Inquiry methods produce a natural way of drawing student interests.
Discrepant event inquiry methods present a realistic way of helping students grasp practicality. The styles of inquiry teaching include an innate and allied relationship for helping students realize reasoning powers. Discrepant event inquiry techniques encompass intellectual ways of aiding students in reaching cooperative, democratic decisions.
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Dartmouth College
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Reverend John Witherspoon was the only ordained clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. Witherspoon's ideas from his Scottish Enlightenment days helped to influence a climate for religious pluralism in the colonies.
Witherspoon worked as the President of Princeton. Witherspoon also subsisted as a teacher. Witherspoon's students included a president and vice-president of the United States, nine cabinet officers, twenty-one senators, thirty-nine congressmen, three justices of the Supreme Court, and twelve state governors. Five of the nine Princeton graduates among the fifty-five members of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 were students of John Witherspoon.
Witherspoon wrote:
"Let all, therefore who wish or hope to be eminent, remember, that as the height to which you can raise a tower depends upon the size and solidity of its base, so they ought to lay the foundation of their future fame deep and strong in sobriety, prudence and patient industry, which are the genuine dictates of plain common sense." (John Witherspoon, by David Walker, Jr., Fleming H. Revell Company, 1906, London and Edinburgh.)
When discrepant event inquiry methods are used as tactics to problem-solve, similar to democracy, they spur a student's self-image. Self-confidence gained from democratic organization and scientific inquiry nurtures and raises the influence of student ideas. That idea force, a kind of democratically American jurisprudence by its substance and character, refines and reflects our human senses.
Master Teachers
We Americans view our country's treasure chest as being full of people from all walks of life. We venerate the great writers, architects, scientists, musicians, composers, pilots, sports idols, inventors, legislators, entertainment greats, and leading thinkers. Of all those people we admire and honor, do we forget that teachers taught those we venerate?
Doubtless, you've been asked the above question before. Some people, it's true, are great despite their teachers, at least the teachers they recall. How much sooner, how much more, could great people accomplish their greatness, if their teachers taught using the processes of master problem solving?
Declaration of Independence
What if people stated to think, for some reason, that the paper our Declaration of Independence might be written on flameproof paper? Would we set fire to it to prove it? To prove if the Declaration of Independence might be fireproof, we could use inquiry.
Inquiry and democracy work together. Master teachers bring them together. Master teachers enlighten due to a universial timeless. The enduring ideals and ideas we gain from master teachers live forever.
"Live long and prosper!"
Why Discrepant Event Inquiry?
What are America's strongest links?
Teachers and Power Problem Solving.
Inquiry and Democracy.
by Jean K. Bruce
William C. Bruce
Associate Dean and Professor
College of Education and Psychology
Phone: (903) 566-7048
e-mail: wbruce@uttyler.edu
http://www.hometreemedia.org
Fax: (903) 566-7036
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Why Discrepant Event Inquiry?
What are America's strongest links?
Teachers and Power Problem Solving
Inquiry and Democracy
The Discrepant Event
Door
Central Hub
Fix
One too many Epiphanies and other Intuitive Leaps?
George Washington, a Vulcan?
The Group
Big D
An Independent Intellect
Clashing Ideas
Substance of Fact
Communal Thinking in Businesses
In Hot Water with Your Favorite Referee?
Déjà vu
What Would a Constitution Class Starship do without Liberty?
Brain Lock
What Would Inquiry Tell us about Klingons?
Defiance
The Tea Tax was Only the Tip of the Iceberg
For the People and by the People
"Aye-aye, more dimensional warp speed."
Shock
School Feminization Turned off Male Leaders
"Rules can never describe life; they can only set the limits." James Willis
Man: A Course of Study
Real Freedom
Dear Democracy:
Building Blocks for Democracy
Tower of Babel
Blessing or a Curse?
Decisions: The Final Frontier
Up, Down, Forward, Reverse
"Live long and prosper!"
Discrepant Event Lesson: The Articles
