Indirect Teaching Methods: Let's find out together, shall we?

Moore, Kenneth D. Effective Instructional Strategies. Chapter 6: Using Indirect Teaching Methods

In this chapter, Moore tackles the more progressive styles of teaching, indirect methods that follow discussion-based and heuristic strategies. The Discussion Method is a valuable, if underused, technique that allows students to supply much of their own content and to reach conclusions mostly on their own. The two main heuristic strategies examined were discovery learning and inquiry learning. Each method relies on the students to engage new material (armed with background knowledge and a bit of teacher guidance) to solve or explore problems independently. These methods can yield an impressive amount of self-motivation and retention but also are very costly in terms of planning time and structure.

As an Algebra teacher, I see room for this technique, but only for certain topics within my content. Algebra requires a great deal of skill development and serves as an essential foundation for all other math and science, thus lending itself less to consistently indirect teaching methods. For other subjects such as science, social studies, and language arts, the utility of these methods is far more transparent to me. Students can see a chemical reaction and surmise how is occurred or they can study events in history and literature and develop theories on the impact of those events.

For mathematics, we can work together to derive some formulas and Properties, but the value in students discovering these things on their own seems lower than for other content areas. As I have discussed before, I also harbor concerns about how effective this type of strategy is in classrooms where self-motivation is lacking. In my mind, self-motivation would have to be established in order to use these indirect methods effectively.