We teachers are good at explaining.
We have spent our days, weeks, and years honing the craft of content delivery, and we often do a better job than experts of explaining complex concepts in ways that our students can understand. We can produce clear and beautiful explanations.
But what do we lose if we limit our students to only our clear and beautiful explanations of the world?
What might it mean if we exposed our students to a variety of explanations, and asked them to choose?
Maybe we make things too easy for students, we shield them from the teeming complexity of human thought and perspective. What if we exposed them to some of that complexity, carefully curated, and helped them construct their own explanations?
An Example: Gravitational Waves
As a single example (though there are examples for every subject area out there), let's take a look at the recent evidence for "inflation" in the very early history of the universe.You could allow students to choose among a variety of short, captivating explanations of what the recent discovery at the South Pole means:
