Galileo Was Right

A Group Discussion

On the evening of July 11, 2000, during part of the time during the Master Teacher Seminar when participants were to supply events for the rest of the attendees, several of us watched an episode of From the Earth to the Moon about the training of the Apollo 15 crew in geology. When lecturing about rocks that never left the lecturer's hand was sapping the motivation of the astronauts who were about to explore the little known surface geology of the moon, Harrison Schmidt recruited one of his former Cal Tech professors to challenge these would-be explorers so that they would not overlook the unusual rock.

Discussants who viewed the episode knew that the underlying assumption for watching was that real teaching is conducted one-to-one or one-to-group. Although no one guffawed when the lecturer in the episode said that the astronauts should "take responsibility for their own learning," several interesting ideas about the nature of teaching did emerge from discussion following the portrayal of Professor Lee Silver's field expedition with several astronauts who were slated to conduct field research on the moon and Professor Farouk El Baz's individual tutoring of the command pilot for Apollo 15, Al Worden, who would be making his own geologic observations from 60 miles up. Here are few of the methods portrayed in the episode that we admired the most--

Real teaching and learning--

	seeks evidence of change
	includes intelligent conversation and application of the knowledge gained
	thrives on mystery
	challenges students with the Big Questions (e.g. whether the moon developed ought of the Earth, along with the Earth, or wandered near and was captured by the Earth)
	deals with "context" or establishes "the big picture"
	sees a story in the data
	interprets the data
	starts with the student's existing knowledge, reaches a stopping point when that has been tapped, and moves to the next step
	builds a human relationship between the students and the teacher based on the need for success and caring about learning
	practices as needed to achieve the required precision in the use of knowledge
	sparks knowledge AND appreciation
	sparks changes of motive, changes of vision

Students are not vessels to be filled, but, as Plutarch stated the relationship, fires to be ignited.

The astronauts of Apollo 15 brought back a rock that was reckoned to be part of the original lunar crust that had been spewed onto the surface as a result of a meteor impact. They noticed the "unusual" item amid the usual data, thanks to the curiosity and dynamism of their teacher. The episode was called "Galileo Was Right" because one of the astronauts dropped a feather and a hammer at the same time in the vacuum of the Moon, demonstrating that Galileo's hypothesis that they should hit the ground at the same time could be proven by direct observation.

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