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Yesterday, during our group discussion, I protested against Paul’s comment, “Do we really want to encourage student achievement at a "low cognitive level" for any students in any contexts?” There are very valuable skills that can be taught in a classroom that, when taught, aren’t particularly creative in nature. Furthermore, I don’t think that skills such as reading directions, following the rules, and obedience are mutually exclusive to creativity. The trick, it seems to me, is to help students distinguish between the benefits of applying those skills in the classroom versus in the workplace, at home, etc. This idea extends from the notion that a classroom has cultural elements of its own. On closer thought, the evaluation of how beneficial applying such skills to a given scenario is sounds similar to the revised scientific method…. I’d like to share an experience where a teacher has successfully incorporated deductive and inductive methods in the classroom.

In the seventh grade, I had Mrs. Butler for pre-algebra. She had taught in the public school system as well as at my private middle school for many years, and was widely regarded as an extremely competent, valued teacher. I’ve tried reflecting on the curriculum as a whole to figure out if her methods were mostly deductive or mostly inductive, and unfortunately I can’t remember them well enough to tell anymore. As far as I can recall, she blended both methods by sprinkling the traditional lecture style classes (deductive) with exploratory assignments and group projects (inductive). Of all our assignments, one in particular stands out in my mind.

Mrs. Butler noticed that seventh graders in general had a hard time following directions, and would consequently get points taken off our national standardized tests, our in-class exams, and our group projects. To address this problem, she devised a project that would teach us how to follow directions. She provided us with materials to make a “project” on a folder in which we made various measurements to create a picture. She then measured these creations looking for close adherence to the directions provided. If the project strayed from the bounds she set for us, points were deducted. By all counts, this is the ultimate deductive project. While I get what Prince and Felder meant by “low cognitive level”, a project that relies very little on creativity or spontaneity, I think that the word itself is loaded and could perhaps be replaced to avoid a reaction such as Paul’s.

The example above applies to current test taking strategies. It’s hard to get around standardized tests when trying to get into college and graduate school. Sure, some schools have begun to rely less on scores and supplement applications with more creative demonstrations of aptitude and knowledge, but it’s still hard to get around them. They’re effective ways to limit the number of incoming applications for a school, but what do they really measure? Mrs. Butler’s assignment, as well as an SAT prep course I took in high school helped me see tests for what they really are: a game. As I said earlier, I think that these skills can be valuable for successfully moving up a highly credential-dependent educational system. However, it needs to be distinguished somehow in a student’s mind that deductive and inductive teaching are two different ways of seeing the story of education and they both have useful applications.

A concern that Ian and Ashley have voiced often in our meetings, and one that I’ve come across during the few Sociology courses I’ve taken has to do with potential social justices issues that relate to this use of deductive methods in the classroom. This concern is that in some school systems that aim to produce students who assume higher level jobs, creativity of thought is stressed, while in other school systems that aim to produce lower level workers, strict adherence to rules is stressed. These different emphases create a deeply stratified workforce along not only educational, but racial and socioeconomic lines. This problem is ever-present and extraordinarily complex as it deals with problems in the foundation on which education and workforces are based. I don’t propose to fix the problem by the above suggestion, but rather to reflect on my personal experiences in education and apply what I know