Teaching - Art or Science?

I think I am going to have to cheat and say that on some level I believe teaching to be both an art and a science.  We have certainly seen how the study of different learning theories and the ways in which individuals learn and understand can definitely be grasped on a scientific level.  But once that process is understood, the real art of the practice of teaching takes over.  Understanding the tools at hand, the instructor must now develop the course work on top of the over-arching principles.  The science provides the foundation, but the art is the source of the rest of the structure.

Collaboration

We are social animals, and - especially when young - we learn by watching others.  Collaboration then is an opportunity to learn from others.  We can see how someone else approaches the same task and maybe discover a more efficient method, or we become satisfied that our way is the best way.  In the true spirit of collaboration, perhaps we meld the two approaches to create the most efficient process.  In this way, collaboration is like an act of building, taking disparate ideas from different individuals and bringing them together to create one thing.

But how does this help us to understand?  Having the opportunity to see things from someone else's perspective provides us with a more balanced understanding of a problem and its potential solution. Being exposed to others’ points of view expands our own understanding of a problem to where we can begin to see more than one side to an argument rather than just our own.  It forces us to explain ourselves, our position, our reasoning, thereby cementing what we know and understand in the telling.  If we are wrong, then we have our collaborators to correct us.