ELEMENTARY SCHOOL SCIENCE: A PROGRESSIVE PLAN FOR CLASSROOM CHANGE

Abstract

In how many thousands of classrooms in the last decade or two have teachers, inspired by the intrinsic appeal of some curricular innovation, come to grief over the behaviour of students reacting to novel demands on their self-control? If only children could take unaccustomed freedoms calmly! Richard Butt, aware that problems of implementation in the classroom have more or less broken the back of the first curricular reform movement in science education, reports a second and more realistic movement now under way; but he still finds inadequate its concern for the complexities of transition at the classroom level. He presents an illustration in detail of a "transitional curriculum," that will enable a traditional class and its teacher to learn by small stages certain necessary new relationships and social disciplines, at the same time as they are inducted gradually into the manipulations, problem-solvings, and team-work involved in an inquiry-oriented curriculum.