I’ve always favored an apprenticeship (epistemological) model for teaching. Not so much learning facts, but learning how people with long experience in an area approach problems to be solved. So to have students do what scientists do (or historians for that matter), and to model how these experts think.
David Brook’s, The Social Animal, expresses this philosophy in a more narrative form:
Of course, Ms. Taylor wanted to impart knowledge, the sort of stuff that shows up on tests. But within weeks, students forget 90 percent of the knowledge they learn in class anyway. The only point of being a teacher is to do more than impart facts; it’s to shape the way students perceive the world, to help a student absorb the rules of a discipline. …
She didn’t so much teach them as apprentice them. Much unconscious learning is done through immitation. She exhibited ways of thinking through a problem and then hoped her students participated along with her.
She forced them to make mistakes. …
She tried to get students to interrogate their own unconscious opinions. …
She also forced them to work. …
— Brooks, D., 2012: The Social Animal.
