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Part One
Learning, planning and evaluation
them on a given topic. From this point teachers start to identify the
concepts to be built, those to be rearranged and the relationships
between the concepts to be stabilised or changed.
2.3
The educational and didactic planning of the
institution
In the phase of educational and teaching programming of the institu-
tion, teachers, taking into account the needs of the pupils, the expec-
tations of the families and the demands of the social contexts in the
territory, prepare the curriculum starting from the essential objectives
to be achieved through conceptual networks of educational units, in
which the concepts and relationships, chosen as learning tasks, are ar-
ticulated and promoted. Teaching by concepts, after having identiied
through the initial conversation the starting knowledge of the pupils
— which L.S. Vygotskij calls the “zone of proximal development” –
involves jeopardising the common sense beliefs through information
able to create cognitive conlict, in order to arrive to a systematic dei-
nition of the concepts that are intended to be built or redeined.
The functional use of “teaching mediators”, i.e. of the different meth-
ods and languages (mimics, iconic, analogue, symbolic), allows the
passage from one physical-perceptive organisation to the logical-sym-
bolic one.
In the conceptual map curriculum, the evaluation accompanies the
whole teaching action, from beginning to end, having different func-
tions: diagnostic, regulatory, control of the acquired conceptual mastery.
In the late 1980s, the spread of the paradigm of complexity, the large
amount of knowledge achieved in every ield of research, the need
for autonomy and decentralisation, and with reference to the con-
structionist concepts of learning from Vygotskij to G. Bateson revived
the new dissatisfaction with the linear logic, the “rational-optimistic”
logic of planning by objectives, which continued to be the most pop-
ular model of curricular planning in schools.
2.4
“Curriculum” planning
In addition to the concept maps
curriculum
, other project patterns ap-
peared, from the one relating to the integrating background, to the