Computer science education is greatly affected by the object-oriented approach. This can be seen in the numerous new teachers being attracted to programming languages such as Java. Learning the object-oriented approach is however difficult for novice students, mostly because it requires a new way of thinking about computing and more depth to grasp. Thus, to promote the object-oriented approach at the introductory level, a re-examination of the teaching method is recommended. This article describes a pedagogical framework rooted in the constructivist epistemology for teaching object-oriented design and programming.