From "The Educated Mind"
1. Identifying importance
2. Finding binary opposites
3. Organizing the content into a story form
What is important about this topic? What is affectively engaging about it?
What binary concepts best capture the affective importance of the topic?
3.1 First teaching event
4. Conclusion
What content most dramatically embodies the binary concepts, in order to provide access to the topic? What image best captures that content and its dramatic contrast?
3.2 Structuring the body of the lesson or unit
What content best articulates the topic into a clear story form?
What is the best way of resolving the conflict inherent in the binary concepts? What degree of mediation is it appropriate to seek? How far is it appropriate to make the structuring binary concepts explicit?
5. Evaluation
How can one know whether the topic has been understood, its importance grasped, and the content learned?
1. Identifying transcendent qualities
What transcendent qualities can be seen and felt as central to the topic? What affective images do they evoke? What within the topic can best evoke wonder?
2. Organizing the topic into a narrative structure
2.1 Initial access
3. Concluding
What aspect of the topic best embodies the transcendent qualities identified as central to the topic? Does this expose some extreme of experience or limit of reality? What image can help capture this aspect?
2.2 Composing the body of the lesson or unit
What content best articulates the topic into a clear narrative structure? Sketch the main narrative line and fit the content to it.
2.3 Humanizing the content
How can the content be shown in terms of human hopes, fears, intentions, or other emotions? What aspect of the content can best stimulate a sense of wonder? What ideals and/or revolts against convention are evident in the content?
2.4 Pursuing details
What parts of the topic can students best explore in exhaustive detail?
How can one best bring the topic to satisfactory closure? How can the student feel this satisfaction?
4. Evaluating
How can one know that the content has been learned and understood and has engaged and stimulated students' imaginations?
1. Identifying relevant general schemes
What general schemes seem best able to organize the topic into some coherent whole? What are the most powerful, clear, and relevant theories, ideologies, metaphysical schemes, metanarratives?
2. Organizing the content into a general scheme
2.1 Initial access
3. Introducing anomalies to the general scheme
How can the general scheme be made vivid? What relevant content best exposes the general scheme and shows its power to organize the topic?
2.2 Organizing the body of the lesson or unit
What content can be used to articulate the topic into a general scheme? What metanarrative provides a clear overall structure to the lesson or unit?
What content is anomalous to the general scheme? How can one begin with minor anomalies and gradually and sensitively challenge the students' general schemes so that they make the schemes increasingly sophisticated?
4. Presenting alternative general schemes
What alternative general schemes can organize the topic? Which can best be used to help students see the contingency of such schemes?
5. Conclusion
How can we ensure that the student's general schemes are not destroyed or made rigid, but are recognized as having a different epistemological status from the facts they are based on? How can we ensure that the decay of belief in the Truth of general schemes does not lead to disillusion and alienation? How can one lead students towards a sophisticated Ironic understanding of the topic?
6. Evaluation
How can we know whether the content has been learned and understood, whether students have developed a general scheme, elaborated it, and attained some sense of its limitations?
Return to The Educated Mind Page