According To Robert Bain's They Thought The World Was Flat?

1.) History is sometimes thought of as a list of things according to Robert Bain in his article “They thought the World Was Flat?” Applying the Principles of How People Learn in Teaching High School History because the central ideas, problems, complex questions and bigger issues “fall away as the curricula are written, reshaped, vetted, voted upon, and adopted” (Bain p. 182). Bain sees curricula objectives inability to “connect outcomes to their intellectual roots”, as well as, “proved the disciplinary connections, patterns, or relationships that enable teachers and students to construct coherent pictures of the history they study”, and most importantly the lack of curricula lists ability to, “build connections across content objectives” as
Providing the students with sources that contested their ideas were: “the first, a picture of a classical statue of Atlas holding up a celestial globe, created between 150 and 73 B.C.E.”; and the second was a recent argument against the flat-earth idea by Carl Sagan’s explanation of the scholar Eratosthenes. The purpose for Bain’s introduction of these sources was to “resonate with stories the students knew or pictures they had seen before”, and to connect with “students’ ideas that some ancient “scientists” were capable of unusually progressive thinking” (Ibid). Calling on his student’s background knowledge Bain provoked his students to, “reconsider the certitude with which they held the flat-earth story”
198). Through working with facts, concepts, and techniques students were able to better understand the “context of these large historical questions, and once they understood the questions, they saw they could not answer them without factual knowledge” (Ibid). Bain made visible students ideas about past issues and therefore was able to “use their ideas to design subsequent instruction and thus encourage them to use historical evidence to question or support their ideas” (Bain p. 199). Bain had his students develop skills historians use such as using “new evidence and other historical accounts to support, extend, or contest students’ understanding” (Ibid). To summarize this analysis Bain consistently asks students to “support, extend, and contest” to help “them situate historical interpretations and sources in relationship to their understanding”