I believe that teaching is an exploration shared between teacher and student and subject matter, in which each person is actively engaged in learning and exploration. The teacher serves not as authority, but instead as guide, and engages in an active, reflective process of trying to understand how students learn and what they know. The reflection process is based in part upon the clinical interviewing of Jean Piaget and Barbel Inhelder, extended by Eleanor Duckworth to encompass understanding of adult learning as well as that of the child.
In the process of learning, I am aided by study of historical accounts of the same kind of learning from the discoverers of physical phenomena. The process by which Galileo, Faraday, Page, Hearder, and others discovered the workings of the physical world was an example of how we can now learn about the same phenomena. Surprising parallels arise between historical accounts and simply watching contemporary students learn about the same things.
I welcome students who wish to join me in this journey, and both understand their own learning and help us to understand how everyone can make the step between simply seeing facts and experiencing them directly.