Sweater Article

This article, "Teaching for Conceptual Change: Confronting Children's Experience," is about just what the title reads.  This article is about teaching students to accept change and knowing the difference about everyday meanings and scientific meanings.  For example the students have their own misconceptions about why the sky is blue but there is an actual scientific  meaning behind why the sky is blue.  The students have a hard time understanding the scientific meaning when they have their own about something.  This article covers the misunderstandings of how students thought when wearing a sweater the temperature would rise but in this experiment the students found out that this was actually false.  When the students performed the experiment the students found out when putting a thermometer inside their sweaters the temperature did not rise.  Since the students were living in Massachusetts and going through those hard, cold winters they believed that inside their sweaters were warmer than outside but in reality the temperature did not rise.  The students performed experiments after experiments trying to figure out an explanation as to why the temperature did not rise and the teacher was in a bit of a dilemma because she could not decide if and how she would tell them the difference between holding heat and emitting heat.  This article describes how the teacher can make changes in the lesson plan and be flexible during the lesson just in case something happens unexpectedly, this article teaches a lesson about conceptual change.  The students are having trouble changing their mind about the sweaters due to their own stubbornness, language, perception, the children's developmental stage, and their own thinking about everyday meanings.  The teacher finally decided to try to change their everyday meaning about how the temperature does not rise in sweaters.  The teacher challenged the students thinking by giving them another activity and the correct scientific meaning of why the sweaters did not rise in temperature.  This activity challenged the students thinking and made them steer away from their own misunderstanding and onto the correct scientific understanding.
    This article does impact me as a teacher because it helps me see how a lesson has to be flexible and take more time on something that you thought would only take a few minutes.  I think the most important thing to do as a teacher is to be flexible because you never know what is going to happen that day.  I really like how this teacher provided the students with more understanding and helped them get to the right understanding by using science.  As a teacher being able to make your students steer away from their misconceptions and on their way to the right understanding is hard to do but it has to be done.  Providing students with the right understanding and how they got there is very important and this article really opens my eyes to this concept.