"Teaching for Conceptual Change: Confronting Children's Experience"

Right off the bat, I love the first sentence, "For nine winters, experience has been the children's teacher." I believe that experience is always a person's teacher, not just for a period of time or in a specific area (like winter.) I also like the fact that Deb O'Brien allows her students to reflect on their experiences and pinpoint where their misconceptions have formed and from there, fix them. We have discussed the issue as well as importance of misconceptions being brought up in classrooms. It is important for students to see what is a correct analysis or interpretation of information rather than simply opinion. One of the great ways I am truly fond of that O'Brien addressed this was having them find out/exlpore the mysteries first hand. This draws the students to the overall theme from this reading, "conceptual change."
Another interesting point mentioned in this reading as well as in others related is the fact that children will actually begin to understand information when they begin to wrestle or test their limits of knowledge. This aids to the belief that students need to be at the center of teaching/learning of a subject, otherwise known as inquiry-oriented. However, I agree with a statement in the article that even though these are the idealistic classroom set-ups, many today still rely on the textbooks for facts that get "absorbed" by the blank slated students.
 I would like to say that I am a constructivist, like the article talks about, because I explore the wonders of the world and create my own understanding through experiences whether it is by assimilating or accomodating my overall knowledge. It is not 100% mandatory for every teacher and learner to be this way, but I do believe that it is essential to have some skills in constructing personal knowledge. Finally I agree with the methods listed for teachers to actively promote students to create new thinking patterns: "stressing relevance, making predictions, and stressing consistancy." As long as students can wrestle with prior knowledge and not be stubborn on altering their preconceived notions, they will become a deeply educated student.