INQUIRY: UNORTHODOX TEACHING

Summary of Chapter 3: "The Inquiry Method" :

Teaching as a Subversive Activity --by Postman/ Weingartner

The inquiry method of teaching and learning is an attempt at re-designinng the structure of the classroom.

It is a new medium, and ... its messages are different from those usually communicated to students ...

The inquiry method IS NOT DESIGNED to do better what older environments try to do.

It works you over in entirely different ways.

It activates different sense, attitudes and perceptions: it generates a different, bolder, and more potent kind of intelligence.

Thus, it will cause teachers, and tests, and grading systems and curricula to change.

It will cause college admission requirements to change.

It will cause everything about education to change.

The focus of intellectual energy becomes the active investigation of structures and relationships, rather than the passive reception of someone else's story ... "once upon a time, there was a man named Newton"... (but) ... authorities get nervous when learning is conducted without a syllabus...

... this is called the "sequential curriculum" ... and one has to visit the Ford Motor plant in Detroit in order to understand fully the assumptions on which it is based. In fact, the similarities between mass production industries and most existing school environments are striking:

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... what do good learners believe?

What do the do?

l. they have CONFIDENCE in their ability to learn.

This does not mean that they are not sometimes frustrated and discouraged. They are, even as are poor learners. BUT they have a profound faith that THEY are capable of solving problems ...

2. they tend to ENJOY solving problems.

The PROCESS interests them, and they tend to resent people who want to "help" by giving them the right answer ...

3. they seem to know what is relevant to their survival and what is not.

They are apt to resent being told that something is "good for them to know"... thus they tend to rely on their own judgment and are...suspicious of "authorities"...

4. they are usually NOT FEARFUL of being wrong. They recognize their limitations and suffer no trauma in concluding that what they believe is apparently not so.

In other words, they can change their minds. Changing the character of their minds is what good learners are most interested in doing...

5. they are emphatically NOT fast answerers.

They tend to delay their judgments until they have access to as much information as they imagine will be available...

6. they are flexible

While they almost always have a point of view about a situation, they are capable of shifting to other perspectives to see what they can find. They know that "answers" are relative...and frequently begin their explanations with the words..."it depends"...

7. they have a high degree of respect for facts (which they know are tentative), and are skillful in making distinctions between ... observations and inferences

8. they do not need to have an absolute, final, irrevocable resolution to every problem.

The sentence, "I don't know," does not depress them ...

so much for the learners.

How about the TEACHERS?

 WE say:

THERE CAN BE NO SIGNIFICANT INNOVATION THAT DOES NOT HAVE AT ITS CENTER THE ATTITUDES OF TEACHERS, AND IT IS AN ILLUSION TO THINK OTHERWISE.

The attitudes of the inquiry teacher are reflected in his behavior. When you see such a teacher in action, you observe the following.

1. their basic mode of discourse with students is questioning.

They believe divergent questions are more important than convergent questions, but uses both. They do not view questions as a means of seducing students into parroting the test...but as instruments to open the mind...

2. generally, they do not accept a single statement as an answer to a question.

In fact, they have a persisting aversion to anyone, any syllabus, any text that offers "the right answer". Not because answers and solutions are unwelcome ... but he is trying to help students be more efficient problem solves. Right answers only terminate further thought.

3. they encourage student-student interaction as opposed student- teacher interaction.

And generally they avoid acting as a mediator or judge of the quality of the of the ideas expressed. The student must judge for himself the quality of work that is done...

4. they rarely summarize the positions taken by students and on the learnings that occur.

Such summary "closes the topic". The only significant terminal behavior that they recognize is death ... and sees that learning does not occur with the same intensity in any two people ...

5. their lessons develop from the responses of students and not from a previously determined logical structure ... does not feel compelled to "cover ground"... or exclude any answer that is not germane...

6. generally, each of their lessons poses a problem for students ...their goal is to engage students in those activities which produce knowledge: defining, questioning, observing, classifying, generalizing, verifying, applying ... true knowledge comes from such activities

7. they measure success in terms of behavioral changes in students ... the frequency with which they ask questions ... the increase in the relevance and cogency of their questions their challenges to the text as an authority...

these behaviors and attitudes amount to a definition of a different role for the teacher from that which he has traditionally assumed. The inquiry environment, like any other school environment, is a series of human encounters ... the teacher should be set in quotations (e.g. "the teacher") because its conventional meanings are inimical to inquiry methods. It is not uncommon, for example, the hear "teachers" make statements such as ... "Oh, I taught them that, but they didn't learn it." There is no utterance made in the Teachers Room more extraordinary than this.

It is like a salesman saying:
"I sold it to him, but he didn't buy it."
It seems to mean that "teaching" is what a "teacher" does, which, in turn, may or may not bear any relationship to what those being "taught" do.
... here we want to stress that

WHEN THE TEACHER ASSUMES NEW FUNCTIONS AND EXHIBITS DIFFERENT BEHAVIORS, SO DO THE STUDENTS. IT IS IN THE NATURE OF THE TRANSACTION. And nothing is more important to know about inquiry methods than this...