In a time where educational reforms wash like tsunami waves over the professionals in schools and teacher education it is increasingly difficult to identify the core of didactics (in the continental sense). Furthermore it seems that different kinds of consultants and other educational agents that influence teacher education and teaching in schools also are under pressure to create new and innovative didactical conceptualizations. Last but not least didactical theory itself seems to develop a huge amount of hyphenated didactical concepts with their own terminology e.g. ict-didactics, relation-didactics, scenario-didactics, museum-didactics, entrepreneurship-didactics. Kron (2008) has identified 40 didactical approaches but there are many more. It is doubtful whether all these practical or theoretical conceptualizations represent progress for the theory of teaching and learning. Terhart (2002) talks even of the end of theoretical development in didactics.

Times is come where didactical theory has to remember its heritage. I want to present and discuss a new-old didactical model that addresses the epistemological challenge of the didactic situation.

For this reason this paper firstly draws upon Klaus Pranges “Zeigestruktur der Erziehung” (2005) (The structure of the human index gesture for education) that indicates a very fundamental gesture for education. Secondly we need a definition of teaching (Unterricht) that is inspired from the phenomenological approach of Wolfgang Sünkel (1996). By combining these two approaches I present a new-old model of the structure of the inner didactics. This model is based on two visible and one invisible component. The act of pointing is the visible action that point at a visible object. Human understanding is based on this act of pointing at something, and is itself something invisible (Tallis 2010). This pointing gesture of the teacher in historical paintings is analysed by Andreas Gruschka (2002). But in fact it is not only the teacher that points, but also the student. Teaching and learning is therefore happening within the interplay of the two pointing gestures: the teacher’s and the student’s. A didactical model has to conceptualize this challenge (Graf 2013).

The didactical model presented in this paper is finally elaborated through and opposed to several didactical models. This comparison includes the classical didactical triangle, the models of Wolfgang Sünkel (1996, Poul Heimann (1962), Wilhelm Peterssen (1971), Wolfgang Klafki (1985), Werner Jank & Hilbert Meyer (2006).

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