Be Less Helpful. That is one of Dan Meyer's key ideas in teaching math. The basic idea is that if you don't help students so much, they can learn to think critically.
Chad Orzel (Uncertain Principles) brings up an interesting point. What do you tell students and what do you not tell them? Clearly, for upper-level undergraduate physics courses, you have to tell them something. They can't just figure everything out on their own. Oh, and by "tell" I mean either actually tell them or let them read it in a book.
What are the course goals?
If you want to figure out how much "telling" there should be in a class, you have to first figure out why there is a class at all. If science is all about models, then you could use the following two goals:
- Model building
- Model using
Building models is what Dan Meyer means when he says be less helpful. Be less helpful and let the students build models. They really need to learn how to do this, and unfortunately the traditional curriculum doesn't give students much practice at this.
But what about quantum mechanics? Could students build their own models here? Absolutely they could. However, this stuff is pretty complicated. Look how long it took to develop (as a science community) some of these ideas. Now, if students did build some new quantum models, they would certainly be "out of the box thinking". I think in a quantum mechanics class, students need to both see where we have been (as a scientific community) and practice developing new models.
Actually, I think there are very few classes where students ONLY build models. Even in Dan's algebra class, students can't build their own trig functions (although that would be cool). In introductory physics, the textbook essentially has all the models the students will use. This doesn't mean they can't still build some models.
An example of building and using models
There is a great physical science curriculum for elementary education majors - Physical Science and Everyday Thinking. It is essentially the same as Physics and Everyday Thinking except that it also includes some chemistry ideas. At the beginning of the curriculum, students practice building models. Here is an example of data that student would collect:
Using carts and motion detectors, students collect evidence to build the model that forces change the speed of an object. You would be surprised how long this can take to build. But also, they don't build this completely on their own. They have help. The textbook will tell them what experiments to try and guide their thinking with some thoughtful questions. Students could do it without this guiding help, but it would take even longer.
In the chemistry part of the curriculum, the main focus is on the small particle model of matter. The idea that many macroscopic level phenomena can be explained based on the idea that stuff is made up of particles. This model is not really developed by the students. It would take too long. Instead, the students collect evidence that shows the model is plausible. They then learn how to use the small particle model in different situations.
So back to the goals. The building models is clearly important. The using models is important if you think the students either need practice at using models or maybe they need to understand the small particle model for later courses.
For physics majors, I think students need to practice model building. They also need to understand what has been done before. They need to stand on the shoulders of giants too.
