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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.
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Figure 1. The Didactic Pentangle
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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.:
- Self-help and Internet pages.
- Learner (student, pupil, anyone having a learning experience)
- Informer (teacher, someone who informs and the like)
- Management
- 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:
- Self-help instructions
- Explanations, instructions (much as in "catechisation" in fig. 2.)
- Rhetorics.
- Divining.
- 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.

There are some difficult key terms below. Some of them are explained
briefly further down. - TK
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Figure 2. The Didactic Triangle
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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.
- OF TEACHING: The heritage of rhetorics lays the foundation of the
informer's presentation of the content.
- OF WORKING ALONG: The catechization heritage influences reveal themselves
in the interaction between informers and pupil/student. OF WORKING ALONG
- 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].

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.

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