October 6

In reading Kuma's Chapter 8, Activating Intuitive Heuristics, I was faced with a similar reaction I have had to much of this book. As I began the chapter, I definitely agreed with the whole "self discovery on the part of the learner," and I still do see how amazing this would be...but I am faced with questions of practicality and if this concept is a little bit too idealistic. In episode 8.2, the teacher does a great job of fostering this self discovery, but how many classes out of 10 in that same scenario would have gotten the same grammatical structures out of looking at this picture? I bet this very teacher if placed with a different group of students would not be able to get this point across herself. What happens when you plan this great activity and present it to the class to be answered by a sea of blank faces. We could argue that this goes back to knowing your students, but what would this teacher have done to foster self-discovery in a basic ESL class? Would we still be striving for this, or would we be taking a more deductive approach? As I read about the benefits of inductive teaching, I began to think of my own learning styles. I am a deductive learner. I like to be given the rules and the opportunity to practice and master them...I am not really sure if I would do well in this type of setting. I would feel lost and without direction. I was glad that the chapter progressed to talk about more of a mixture between inductive and deductive strategies, and I think if we look at the brain and go back to what we have learned about left/right brained studens, we would see the importance of including both. This also seems to me to be very westernized...I wonder how students of different cultures would take this push for self-discovery. This would be interesting to research across levels and cultures!