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The Didactic Pentangle and Triangle

Considering tools of educational theory
Models help thinking by affording overviews of main points and relations between some of them, if not all of them. Below are some pedagogy models to look into, and with a book reference.

Contents

Frieze
Take care: Supporting "well medleys" are presupposed throughout:

The Didactic Pentagram

The Didactic Pentangle
Figure 1. The Didactic Pentangle


A study of the pentangle (and pentagram) can pay off handsomely.
      The five points at the rim include the well known "learning material", student, and teacher and two more that often appear where persons learn things.:
  1. Self-help and Internet pages.
  2. Learner (student, pupil, anyone having a learning experience)
  3. Informer (teacher, someone who informs and the like)
  4. Management
  5. Content (article or book on a Internet site, etc.
One or more of these are normally involved in a typical learning situation.

Some seek learning; they are "propelled" from inside. Others have learning pushed onto them, they suffer from "obligatory readings" which in many cases are killjoys to learning through interest.
      The five sides of the pentagram are suggested, they represent different sides to education and learning:

  1. Self-help instructions
  2. Explanations, instructions (much as in "catechisation" in fig. 2.)
  3. Rhetorics.
  4. Divining.
  5. Methodology in general
One aim of learning is to attain the fluency involved.
      In the next chapter three of the sides of the pentangle are told of.

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The Didactic Triangle

There are some difficult key terms below. Some of them are explained briefly further down. - TK
The Didactic Triangle
Figure 2. The Didactic Triangle


Adjunct professor Stefan Hopmann at NTNU in Trondheim says that one may come across the didactic triangle in several versions. Its three pillars and the reciprocal influence (or interaction) between them constitute didactics with content, informer, and pupil/student.
  1. OF TEACHING: The heritage of rhetorics lays the foundation of the informer's presentation of the content.
  2. OF WORKING ALONG: The catechization heritage influences reveal themselves in the interaction between informers and pupil/student. OF WORKING ALONG
  3. OF LEARNING: Methodology is related to the pupil's or student's learning and his or her (learning) experiences. [All: Drep 201]
Who first made the schematization is unknown. It existed in principle in the "Didactica Magna" by Jan Comenius. [Drep 201n]
      Hopmann goes somewhat cursorily into salient points and facets of the model on further pages [Drep 201-07].

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Key Terms According to Merriam-Webster

One or more of the central meanings of a key term may suggest insights that could bring benefits.
Catechize:
to instruct systematically especially by questions, answers, and explanations and corrections; to question systematically or searchingly.

Didactic:
systematic instruction.

Divining:
to discover intuitively; have hunches (Bruner); infer; to discover or locate things by way of intuitive means; to practice divination; to perceive intuitively; foresee. Divining in some of its main meanings can and should lead into forestalling.

Informer:
A teacher, or someone who imparts knowledge or news. One whose occupation is to councel, instruct, discipline, and/or educate.

Manage:
to handle or direct with a degree of skill; to make and keep compliant; to treat with care; to exercise executive, administrative, and supervisory direction of; to work upon or try to alter for a purpose; to succeed in accomplishing; contrive; to direct the professional career of.
      Also: to direct or carry on business or affairs; to direct team work; to achieve one's purpose; conduct.

Methodology:
a body of methods, rules, and postulates employed by a discipline; a particular procedure or set of procedures; the analysis of the principles or procedures of inquiry in a particular field.

Rhetorics:
the art of speaking or writing effectively: as the study of principles and rules of composition formulated by critics of ancient times; the study of writing or speaking as a means of communication or persuasion; skill in the effective use of speech; a type or mode of language or speech; also insincere or grandiloquent language; verbal communication; discourse.


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Adjoined

Drep: Uljens, Michael, ed: Didaktik - teori, reflektion och praktik. Studentlitteratur. Lund, 1997.

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