Am I the only one who enjoyed this approach?
I was taught atomic theory chronologically starting with the plum pudding model, then rutherford's model, then Bohr's model and finally the quantum models.
At each stage, the focus was on:
* What observations led the scientists in question to propose the model? e.g. in Rutherford's case, there was an extensive discussion on the gold-foil experiment, the observations he saw, and the conclusions he drew from it (e.g. that a lot of mass must be packed into a tiny space).
* What properties follow from adopting them model? e.g. with Rutherford's model, the notion of an accelerating charged particle (electron) would mean that the electron would continuously lose energy until it crashes into the nucleus. obviously this isn't happening.
* Repeat the cycle: how did bohr's model attempt to overcome these problems.
We did the same with the theories on acids and bases: how Arrhenius' concept required the notion of liquid to be present, how Bronsted and Lowry formulated it more generally as proton donation and acceptance, and how Lewis formulated it in terms of electrons.
I like that at each step, we learned WHY these models were proposed and how they explained the phenomena seen until then. We learned WHAT the consequences of making a physical model are, and we learned WHAT new observations could not be accounted for. Then we learned about how concepts are generalized to account for more information.
In contrast, if I had just been shown a beautiful but complex model at the beginning, I'm not sure I would have learned as much or held as much interest. The difference is like seeing a very elegant proof to a problem vs seeing the different half-correct approaches culminating into a final solution. I feel that if the goal is to teach people how to think like scientists, show them the process not the final result.