Reflection 1

lesson 1

INDUCTIVE TEACHING STRATEGY

Meaning:

Inductive Teaching Strategy:

A teaching strategy in which the teacher presents a set(s) of data or situations and encourages students to infer a conclusion, generalization, definition, hypothesis or pattern of relationships.

It allows students to observe the specifics and then to conclude, infer, classify, compare and generalize about the entire group of particulars.

Types

1.      Guided inductive strategy: When the teacher provides the specifics of the lesson from which the students make generalizations and conclusions.

2.      Unguided inductive strategy: When students are encouraged to provide the cases/specifics for analysis from which to draw conclusions.

Features of Guided Inductive Strategy:

The learners progress from data examination, observation and generalization.

The teacher controls the elements – the specifics, situations or objects – and structures a meaningful pattern on the observations being made in the classroom, which in fact is a 'learning laboratory’.

The teacher encourages as many students as possible to respond to the specifics provided.

Unguided Inductive Strategy

The teacher controls only the materials and simply poses questions such as, “Tell me everything that you have to share with your friends upon your observation of the things?” etc.

Students’ bringing the data pre-supposes their previous analysis of the matter. This helps a lot of creativity.

As it is more student-centered, there can be unlimited number of generalizations, out of which the teacher leads them to the relevant hypothesis through probing questions.

Phases in the Inductive Strategy

Phase I: The open ended phase

·         Shows the students an example/ non-example of a concept

·         Students observe and describe

·         Give another example and so on until they compare the examples and non-examples.

Phase II: The convergent Phase

·         Prompt students to identify patterns in the examples

Phase III: Closure

·         Arrive at a definition or hypothesis or formula by explicitly stating the patterns in the examples.

Phase IV: The Application Phase

·         Application of the definition…

Advantages of Inductive Teaching Strategy

·         It involves observation, inference, classification and comparison.

·         It can be used at all levels of study at varying degrees.

·         It incorporates all the questioning techniques including prompting, probing and content review.

·         It ensures greater interaction among the learners and the teacher

·         It discourages wild guessing as each inference should be validated by proper evidences.

Disadvantages of Inductive Strategy

·         The content coverage can be the smallest amount.

·         Inductive discovery needs verification, in different cases, through deduction.