Taking the Plunge! For the Better, hopefully.

Since the beginning of my teaching career, 3+ years ago, I have heard and thought a lot about an inquiry based approach to learning. I'm saying learning because I have found that anyone can try teach, but it is the learning that is taking place that is the key to success. Working with a small number of students may sound easy, but there are still many different ways that each of the children learn best, and the hard part of teaching has been seeing that the way that I "teach" best is not always the way that the students "learn" best. 

So I decided to be daring and try incorporating a discovery based approach where the students help each other and work towards an understanding of a topic. Preparing for a class on fractions I decided to formulate a question and then give students just the basic information and let students build an understanding of the topic for themselves. The question I gave the students was: 

Since the measurement of degrees in a circle is 360, at which degree would you have to cut the circle so that you can show, halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, sixths, sevenths, eighths, ninths, tenths, elevenths, and twelfths? 

The students were then paired and given a piece of chart paper, a calculator, protractor, and compass as tools to help them display that they understood the concept being "discovered".

Like I had thought, the initial reaction was "unwillingness to try", however, this soon passed and at the end of 40 minutes each of the groups was well established in their pursuit of understanding.

Throughout the lesson, I circulated amount the groups asking questions and observing the progress, all while trying to keep myself from assisting them too much and interrupting the learning process. I find that with the teaching style I have been utilizing, I have been doing most of the critical thinking and "spoon feeding" the student instead of letting them think and make the connections for themselves. 

My goal as an educator is to wean students off of my lectures and dictations and letting them choose their own paths, and to stand by and act more as a guide than as a driver.

Tomorrow, we shall see how well students remember what they discovered today and how well it set in for them as opposed to previous lectures and lessons.

As the saying goes, so far, so good.