Bible Students

Thoughts on “Strategies and Models for Teachers” by Eggen and Kauchak (chapter 5)

This week’s reading covered the classroom method of guided discovery. Guided discovery is the practice of not explicitly explaining concepts to students, but rather asking questions to lead the students to a discovery of the concepts on their own. This has the advantage of higher retainment and comprehension, since the concepts are given explanative contexts derived from the student themself. They are learning from the inside, rather than from the outside. 

The students must be guided to answers without being explicitly told. They can compare and contrast concepts in a topic to discover the answer. The most important part of this method is to have the teacher skillfully ask questions, rather than going in blind. The teacher must know the concept well beforehand in order to ask penetrating questions. 

The individual discovery of concepts by the students proves to be an effective method of discovery, as the student is able to understand a concept from the inside, rather than gaining information from the outside. Exploring these concepts through comparing and contrasting to good and bad examples will make a more well-rounded concept. This will help to discover the essential and nonessential characteristics, like color and size. 

Concepts such as triangles and fractions are more simple to teach, because there are few concrete identifiers and characteristics to them. A triangle has 3 sides connected at three points. This is a very straightforward and concrete concept to understand. However, something like textual evaluation or a character’s motivation in a book will be less concrete and more difficult to explore through questions. Comparing different characters in the story and contrasting contrary motivators will be helpful to guide students to understand a character’s motivation. 

One example of something notoriously hard to teach would be grammar. Grammar in English only loosely follows guide rules, and so discovery where those guides are is difficult. One must learn to teach patterns, especially in the case of grammar, to aid with guided discovery. Giving laws and principles are examples of a general understanding which is almost always true, but which can be shown false in certain situations. Guided discovery is almost impossible without outside information being put in by the teacher. 

Teachers must prepare examples and nonexamples with a clear learning objective beforehand. A learning objective is what the lesson seeks to accomplish. Understanding the learning objective gives direction to the lesson, and apart from it the lesson will not accomplish a clear goal. For example, being able to synthesize a proper grammatical sentence or identify equilateral triangles among various triangles. If learning about insects, the teacher should know how to contrast insects to other similar creatures, like spider, which seem like insects, but are not. Teachers must be able to contrast the concepts in order to teach the students. 

Teachers must form examples of the concepts which clearly fit the rules, then also present negative examples of what does not fit the rules well. These examples are key for guiding students to concept attainment. Teachers must use as many illustrations as necessary to demonstrate. This may be quite a few, and may take multiple lessons. However, if the point of the lesson is to have the students understand the concept, then multiple lessons may be needed to accomplish this goal. 

Giving real world, concrete examples are best for bringing abstract concepts to reality. As explained in an article for Instruction and Methods, concrete examples of abstract problems, such as mathematics probability, will show favorable retainment of the lesson, and demonstrate superior understanding of the topic while still taking a similar amount of time as a lecture. Additionally, using kinesthetic learning methods in addition to verbal methods is helpful to understanding the concepts more fully. 

The higher quality the lesson, the more the students will be able to gain from it. Notice in the previous paragraph I explained that kinesthetic learning takes around the same time as lectures. However, it takes much more planning and foresight to pull it off. Additionally, better photos of concepts may take more time to attain. Revamping a lesson may take much more time, but it may result in a far better retainment by the students. Teachers must remember their faithfulness to Jesus is not ultimately measured by the students’ retainment, but by the effort the teacher is putting in to help them retain it. 

Things that are difficult to define, like internal conflict, must be defined by using examples. Simulations with the whole class are helpful to bring out of the abstract. Technology is a great use of time. Using images and software is useful for digital simulations.  Begin the lesson by introducing the ideas. Show some examples and explain the common similarities between them. Ask the students to explain the similarities and have the teacher ask questions to tighten the definition. Explain what it is not. Make their own examples. Do not give exactly what you are looking for, ask them to do it themself. 

Ask open-ended questions which relate to what the students are discovering. Teachers usually ask questions which have a specific answer, but after examining how the student is feeling about it, they can ask questions that only guide them to the answer without actually saying it. Praise the students for their good work. Give what they are explaining well. For the haiku, ask Ask questions and support the ones which are closer to the correct answer, and affirm them. Continue to ask smaller and smaller questions which narrow down the correct answer. 

Closure of the questions and application is important not to forget. The questions must be answered through the guided discovery by the students. After the questions are answered, the concepts must be applied. If the concepts are not grasped, they will not be able to move on in the lesson. Students must verbally state the idea present in the concept. 

Asking them how they know something is a way of forming guided discovery. Asking them to show their work, explain what another student means. Student involvement is very helpful. What do you notice? Older students may need time to adjust to open ended questions. Calling on students keeps them on their toes. Guided discovery will have to be shorter with younger students.