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In this 50th anniversary of the Jean Piaget Society, we have been asked to celebrate The Having of Wonderful Ideas and Other Essays on Teaching and Learning (Duckworth, 2006) – winner of the 1988 AERA award for outstanding research contribution in the areas of teaching and teacher education, now in its 3rd edition, published on four continents, in 7 languages. We have taken the name that Inhelder gave to Piaget’s research method – Critical Exploration – as the basis for the name of our approach to teaching – Critical Exploration in the Classroom. In this paper, we talk about what that name and this book mean to our teaching and to constructivism. Each one of the four authors has written one section, allowing us to present several different aspects of the book.

In this commentary, summarized from a recent interview, the author reminisces about a career dedicated to critical exploration in the classroom. She discusses the formation of the Moon Group, a group of teachers who met over a period of 25 years to study the behaviour of the moon. Duckworth later describes an exercise in which her students experimented with the positioning of a small mirror in the classroom in order to be able to predict where to place it on a wall so one student can see another in a different part of the room. In another exercise, she had university students observe the learning of children by having them solve spatial problems without any advice or prompts from an adult. She concludes by providing guidance for classroom teachers, emphasizing the importance of making sure, “what you want them to learn is worth learning about.”

The author underscores that in any worthwhile educational enterprise there is not one point to be learned—there are infinite points. Using Nicola Sellitto’s insightful "soul purpose" observation as a springboard, she stresses that having no single "point" to convey does not mean doing no teaching. Instead, it means recognizing what enhances the students’ sense of the world’s possibilities, and of their capacity to take part in them. It means keeping the students connected to the possibilities. Drawing on the work of Rauchwerk, Hawkins, Hughes-McDonnell, Cavicchi, Auger and others, she illustrates how teaching students in genuine open-ended settings—in which soul purposes are cultivated—fosters exploratory behaviour, making them eager and engaged learners.

Winnie the Pooh said, of the hums that came to him from time to time, “Poetry and hums aren’t things which you get. They’re things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can fi nd you” (Milne, 1928/2007, p. 173). This journal issue is about helping students get their minds, their awareness, and their feelings so active and thoughtful and informs that they are in a place where hums—or connections, understandings, new ideas—can fi nd them. I start with a brief story. My colleague Alythea McKinney and I were presenting some of her work to a group of research educators. She described engaging fi fth and sixth graders in a critical exploration (see Cavicchi et al., 2009) of documents pertaining to butter making in the United States at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. These children had been examining original historical texts and images, and forming ideas about how U.S. farmers and their families might have experienced the Industrial Revolution; and they were taking those ideas further through drawing and writing about them, through considering each other’s thoughts and drawings, and through examining further documents that McKinney offered them (McKinney, 2008). Our audience was interested, engaged, and impressed with the student work. But we had presented the work as an example of critical exploration, our particular approach to curriculum and teaching, and near the end of the session one member of the audience asked us what was unique about what we were doing. She recognized that the children whose work we presented are working together, that they are provided well selected resource materials, that they create artwork in the interests of

A colleague told me about a meeting at which she was present some years ago with Michael Huberman and some doctoral students. She never forgot it, she said. I was interested because I was about to ...

In this article, Eleanor Duckworth focuses on the nature of understanding by leading the reader through the process of extended clinical interviewing. Duckworth describes some of her own explorations of science and how those experiences showed her what learning could be like. Those experiences included working with "a highly imaginative bunch of scientists and teachers of science" while developing the Elementary Science Study, a curriculum development program. As she describes it, Duckworth "got hooked" on the excitement of learning and has been an educator ever since, working to develop engaging learning experiences for both teachers and students. This article continues her effort to do just that, with lengthy descriptions of her own and her students' struggles — and enjoyment — as they attempt to understand and define various phenomena. And with that, she opens the discussion of "keeping it complex.

In setting out to say what I think is important for museum educators to have in mind about developmental theory, I want to use Jean Piaget's work on the development of understanding in infancy, where the roots of children's thinking lieand our own as well. I hope this perspective will offer some useful insights into ways all of us can help learners approach new material. The single most important aspect of Piaget's thought for museum educators is his emphasis on the centrality of actions to ways of knowing. Piaget traces all human knowledge to its roots in the activities of infants.1 Transforming the knowledge gained through actions in infancy into conceptual, representational knowledge is a lifelong human endeavor. Childhood is an interesting middle ground. For the most part, we believe we understand children's experiences, and yet sometimes their perspectives can stun us. When this happens, it is usually because of the centrality of action as a means of understanding. It is worthwhile to sketch out what Piaget means when he speaks of an infant's actions as the root of knowledge by looking at his presentation of the development of the notion of permanent objects during the first year of life. The general finding of his classic study Construction of Reality in the Child (1950) is well known. In their first few months, infants act as if an object has no continuing existence of its own. If an interesting plaything the infant is reaching for is covered with a cloth, he or she stops reaching for it. Or, even more significant, the infant will go back to look for it in a place he or she has found it before. To the infant the object does not seem to have an integrity, a location in space. What is less well known is Piaget's interpretation of the infant's experience before he or she develops the notion of object permanence. To begin with, what we would call an object is for the child indissociable from his or her own action. Here are Piaget's words, describing a sixto nine

After an extended account of two features which she considers to be the essence of teaching,Eleanor Duckworth describes how such teaching can, at the same time, be seen as a form of research. In conclusion, she proposes a vision of teachers as significant participants in theoretical and pedagogical discussions on the nature and development of human learning.

This essay is a response to the history of American reactions to Piaget's work—skepticism about his findings, followed by a desire to accelerate development. Influenced by the mass of psychological research devoted to these issues, educators have adopted them as their concerns as well. Eleanor Duckworth sketches this history, reviews recent Genevan learning research, and in so doing, suggests that the dilemma is both false and beside the point. She turns to a consideration of issues of greater educational concern,bringing Piaget's work to bear on them.

Two key points of Piaget's psychology are developed and illustrated. The first is that sensory data are interpreted through kinds of knowledge which themselves are not proven or disproven by sensory data. The second is that children's thinking is often characterized by difficulties in decentering from striking aspects of a situation.

This project seeks out individual learning initiatives from the educational community for support, dissemination and adaptation. Teachers are encouraged to share their ideas in the project newsletter, descriptive articles, exchange visits and periodic Saturday meetings. Resources multiply as educators organise and extend their ideas through such methods as teachers' guides and resource inventories.

The accent must be on autoregulation, on active assimilation—tbe accent must be on the activity of the subject. Failing this, there is no possible didactic or pedagogy wbjch significantly transforms the subject.1

Explaining that no definitive pedagogy flows from the developmental theory of Jean Piaget, the author explores ways that classroom teachers can nevertheless make powerful use of that theory. For her, the essence of the child's intellectual development lies not in the progressive accomplishment of Piagetian tasks, but in the child's testing out the ideas that she or he finds significant. This process of testing out ideas, she argues, is critical for the child's cognitive growth. Teachers can assist this growth primarily by accepting the child's perpective as the legitimate framework for generating ideas—allowing the child to work out her or his own questions and answers. This approach—and the importance of providing varied settings and materials which suggest ideas to children—is discussed with particular reference to the author's classroom experience and her evaluation of an elementary science program.

In Open Education and the American School, Roland S. Barth wrote that “one central idea differentiates the open educator's concept of evaluation: in the open school, evaluation is primarily for the benefit of the learner, and only secondarily for the convenience and benefit of parent, teacher, or administrator…. The teacher's intention … is not to judge but to reflect back to the child the consequences of his behavior. As judge, the adult's best interests are served: he asserts his power and influence over the child. As facilitator, the child's best interests are served: he becomes aware of his difficulties, the need for improving his performance, and ways of doing so.” In this next article, evaluation by the music teacher is discussed by Eleanor Duckworth, a Canadian educator who has served as a translator for Jean Piaget during his United States lectures. She is senior research associate at the Atlantic Institute of Education, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and coordinator of the Institute's “Lighthouse Learning Program.”—Ed.

Goals and activities of the Elementary Science Study Branch of the Educational Services Incorporated are discussed in this paper by Eleanor Duckworth. As in other curriculum projects the influence of psychological approaches is seen to be minimal. However, procedures are judged to be sound. Additional comments by Ben Nichols on his work with electricity in the fourth grade provide a specific example of the work being done at ESI.

Une 6quipe de quatre personnes de formation et d'exp6rience varides fut cr66e pour effectuer une evaluation externe de la premiere phase de cinq ans de la Fondation d'6tudes du Canada. Pour leur travail, les membres de l'6quipe ont utilis6 plusieurs types d'information, en particulier des questionnaires structures et de longs entretiens libres. Partant de l'id6e que la Fondation visait surtout la cr6ation de programmes d'6tudes, leur point de vue s'est modifi6 lorsqu'ils se sont rendu compte des effets que la Fondation avait sur les participants eux-memes. Le rapport final de l'dquipe se centre sur les perspectives futures, plutot qu'il ne juge le travail du pass6.