ABSTRACT
A teacher who interprets sense-making as stupidity is committing educational malpractice. Sometimes misconceptions take a while to bubble to the surface. In one classroom where students were developing models on flip-chart paper to explain the dispersion of food dye in water, an interesting argument emerged between two groups of students. One faction felt that when the beaker of water turned a uniform color, the particles of dye and the water molecules were evenly mixed, as their model demonstrated with red (dye) and blue (water) dots evenly distributed. However, the other part of the class felt that because food dye changed the color of things, it had actually changed the color of the water molecules themselves. There is a misconception among some teachers that giving voice to a wrong idea in a classroom is harmful, as if it could spread like an airborne infection. Decades of cognitive and educational research have shown these fears to be unfounded.
