(I’m republishing my best posts from the first half of the year. You can see the entire list of them here)
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Apparently, a lot of energy is going on these days into academics arguing about whether inquiry or directly instruction is the best form of pedagogy, particularly in science education (see Two groups of scholars revive the debate over inquiry vs. direct instruction at The Hechinger Report).
I’m not really sure that inquiry versus direct instruction is a particularly helpful framework for a debate, not when a successful hybrid is being practiced by many teachers – inductive teaching/learning or, as a big study a few years ago described it, “enhanced discovery learning.”
There are many forms of inductive learning, which you can find at The Best Resources About Inductive Learning & Teaching.
It’s basically a matter of guiding students to identify patterns and explain the reasoning behind those patterns. They function as detectives.
It can include students categorizing teacher-created data sets, which can be texts or just about anything else. I taught a science class once to ELLs where students were learning about the density of water, and they were testing out a variety of objects to see if they would float or not.
Or, it could be using concept attainment, where a teacher shows a list of “good” and “bad” examples, and students have to work together to identify why the items are listed under each one.
So, I’ll pass on the false dichotomy and, instead, focus on…teaching.
(I’m republishing my best posts from the first half of the year. You can see the entire list of them here) Apparently, a lot of energy is going on these days into academics arguing about whether inquiry or directly instruction is the best form of pedagogy, particularly in science education (see Two groups a look back Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…
