DISCOVERY LEARNING AND DISCOVERY TEACHING

Teachers interested in promoting student inquiry often feel a tension between that agenda and the more traditional agenda of ''covering the content.'' Efforts in education reform devote substantial time to addr essing this tension, primarily through curriculum reform, paring the t raditional content and adopting inquiry-oriented methods. Discovery le arning approaches, in particular, are designed td engage students in i nquiry through which, guided by the teacher and materials, they ''disc over'' the intended content. Still, the tension remains, for example, in moments when students make discoveries other than as intended. How teachers experience and negotiate these moments depends largely on the ir expectations of curriculum and instruction. For some, successful in struction entails progress through a planned set of observations and i deas, and such moments of divergence may represent impediments. Others see the classroom as an arena, not only for student exploration but a lso for teacher exploration, of the students' understanding and reason ing, of the subject matter, of what constitutes progress toward expert ise and how to facilitate that progress. For them, successful instruct ion depends on teachers' often unanticipated perceptions and insights. One might call this discovery leaching. This article presents a detai led account of a week of learning and instruction from my high school physics course to provide a context for discussion of the role and dem ands of teacher inquiry. For the view supported here, the coordination of student inquiry and traditional content is not simply a matter of reducing the latter and welcoming the former. It is a matter of discer ning and responding to students' particular strengths and needs.