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It seems clear (at least to us in our graduate coursework instruction), that the essential first step is to help people formulate the basic problem of explaining how mental activity develops. Stages are a proper method of description of thought as it develops but the explanatory problem—how thought goes from one stage to the next—is the essential problem teachers must grasp if they wish to base their instruction on a verified model of development such as developmental epistemology. To help our teacher/students tackle the idea of development, we started in the first minute of class with a videotape that showed the difficulty of children’s classification activities. The organization of our courses (later courses began with the bending rods or the mountains tasks, etc.) always focused on turning teachers into researchers since those research processes are the ones involved in the construction of knowledge, and they must, in the same sense, be essential for promoting teachers?development of their understanding of student development. For that reason, we always began with helping teachers properly formulate a problem. We called this first phase of our instructional cycles, the initiatory/motivational phase, and it led to the second phase of problem posing and formulation; we used a videotape of the class inclusion task as a method to help teachers formulate the fundamental problem of development. Once they understood that the problem was not that of stages or how children think differently from adults but how the early form of mental activity manages to transcend its initial limitations to eventually match adult forms, they then developed a motivation to conduct the task questioning themselves. We found from their feedback that helping teachers obtain displays of children’s thinking, that is, how to pose class inclusion problems to students, enabled teachers to clearly see the problem of development and its implications for classroom instructional methods. Once teachers could see the limited nature of students?early thinking about class inclusion, they quite naturally discussed and argued about various notions of what might cause development, and we helped them categorize these notions as the basic factors of development—social, experiential, maturational, logical-mathematical experiences and thereby clarify the problem of the developmental factor. Then having teachers use the same task to conduct interviews with children led naturally to the next phases of instruction, etc. For example a simple task protocol form provided them with a data retrieval format for their interviews with children which results they brought back to class. With only an hour with a graduate student, rather than giving information about developmental theory, it might be more productive to help the student formulate the fundamental problem of development by using a videotape displaying children tackling the class inclusion task. It’s purpose would be to help them see the fundamental problem of development confronted in each new situation—stated in its most general form, the problem is: how does knowledge arise in the human species? Or even in a more general form, how do living systems transcend a present form so as to evolve and develop new forms of adaptation to their environments. whether these adaptations are viewed as biological, social, or as psychological. The display of reasoning by tasks can also quite naturally raise the need and problem of three subordinate concepts, the first being that of the assimilation and accommodation of every act of knowledge—pulling activity apart to distinguish the assimilatory form children use in class inclusion from the accommodation of its form due to the object. The need to describe the assimilatory form leads quite naturally to the second problem of describing the structural form of activity—the use of functional forms and the later grouping and group systems to describe the organization of the assimilatory activities displayed by a human subject. The accommodation process raises the third problem, that of how observations and facts among students differ depending on the assimilatory form used. Thus, the impossibility of using some kind of direct apprehension of properties or information given directly from the object or other external factor in the formulation of knowledge of the object and the failure of simple leaning theory. So again, the problem must return to the development of activity as it directs itself to the assimilation of the object in the construction of knowledge. We did notice that some teachers, such as high school physics teachers, more quickly grasped the problem and got into its investigation with their students than did some other elementary teachers. But it did seem that an hour devoted to the problem formulation phase using task tapes was sufficient to help all but a small minority see and get started on the problem of development.