Didactics and instructional research can take the so-called didactic triangle as their starting point, a colourful and complex relation of teachers, students and content within the frame of instruction. In our time, all three „corners“ have come into trouble. The teachers’ role is often seen as that of a coach who should abstain from teaching and better help students to develop their competences and their subject matter knowledge. Students have their traditional role as those who have to learn what the schools offer them, but contemporary research on general education („Bildung“ in the German language context) finds a de-subjectivation of the learning subjects due to the fact that their identity depends on societal demands and is constituted in the various contexts of their activities in ever-new ways. And subject matter has proven to be a construction, which may depend on the cultural heritage produced in schools on a national basis over the centuries, but what students really need today in the light of worldwide globalization cannot be justified with respect to national traditions. Students have to find their own world views and their self concepts themselves and at the same time they have to cope with the demands of the ever changing, globalizing world. In this situation, restrained teaching may show a path into the globalized future, and this implies the description of the didactical situations for teaching and learning worldwide. For a start, I will therefore present lesson-planning schemata that may show, in their diversity, how difficult it is to find the path into the future. My examples are constructed with respect to John Amos Comenius, the founding father of didactics, with his theologically inspired model, to Lothar Klingberg, the top representative of the German Democratic Republic with a dialectical model, to Wolfgang Klafki representing the old German Federal Republic with a categorial model focusing on content, the American Ralph W. Tyler, with a behaviourist model and Gérard Sensevy, the French mathematics didactician who develops an epistemologically structured model.

Hudson, B. and Meyer, M. (2011) Introduction: Finding common ground beyond fragmentation. In B. Hudson and M. Meyer (Eds.) Beyond Fragmentation: Didactics, Learning and Teaching in Europe, Verlag Barbara Budrich, Opladen and Farmington Hills, 9-28. Meyer, M. Hellekamps, S. and Prenzel, M. (2008) (Eds.) Perspektiven der Didaktik: Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, Special Issue 9. Meyer, M.A., Hellekamps, St., and Wulf, Ch. (Eds.) (2012): Didactics in Europe. In: Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, Vol. 15, No. 3. Meyer, M. (2011) Professional teacher development and educational experience. In B. Hudson and M. Meyer (Eds.) Beyond Fragmentation: Didactics, Learning and Teaching in Europe, Verlag Barbara Budrich, Opladen and Farmington Hills, 404-422.