This is a method of teaching whereby a teacher states a universal rule and places the task of applying it to specific situations on the students. You should check out our new grade calculator. This is a teacher-centered approach to teaching new content to students. The deductive method of teaching includes three general initiatives. These include:
Activity planning: Here, teachers determine the concept that needs to be taught to ensure that the lesson’s point is firmly driven home. You should check out our new high school GPA calculator. It helps to cover all the important points in the lesson.
Activity execution: This includes connecting what had already been taught and what the teacher is going to teach at present. Teachers can ask pupils questions about the earlier class to assess their comprehension before proceeding further.
Activity evaluation: It involves asking questions associated with individual topics taught so far and questions to differentiate between concepts. This may be in the form of short-answer-type questions to be explained with appropriate examples or multiple-choice questions to make a distinction. It helps teachers in assessing the individual efforts of the students. Teachers can also identify students who missed a class and pay special attention to them.
To clearly understand the deductive teaching method, one can imagine a scenario where the teacher presents a new grammar concept to the class. While presenting it, the teacher first explains the concept and the rules for its correct usage. Then the teacher uses different ways to allow the students to practice the concept. For instance, the instructor writes sentences to explain the rules of the present and past tenses. After this, the teacher hands out worksheets in which students are asked to convert present tense to past tense and vice versa.
The advantages of the deductive teaching method include:
- Students solve problems efficiently and more quickly.
- Teachers can easily cover most of the learning materials using this method.
- Quick learning is encouraged as it’s a time-saving technique. For instance, the solutions to mathematical problems require less time due to the pre-established formulae.
- Encourages pupils to memorize the rules and is useful for the practice and revision stage.
The disadvantages of the deductive teaching method include:
- It isn’t ideal for improving pupils’ reasoning capabilities.
- Sometimes, beginners might find it difficult to understand an abstract formula because they lack acquaintance with different concrete instances.
- It requires students to blindly memorize lots of formulae that may make them feel overwhelmed. As a result, students often tend to forget the formulae.
- Eventually, this method prioritizes memory over intelligence and comprehension, which is educationally unsound.
Concluding Thoughts
Deductive teaching is geared towards presenting new concepts to the students, before giving the students the opportunity to apply these concepts to different scenarios. The teacher is the point of authority, and guides the students in the application of the new concepts, which may be built on previous related concepts. Deductive teaching is time-efficient, and allows the teacher to cover most of the learning materials.
However, due to its constrictive nature, deductive teaching fails to provide students with further reasoning capabilities, as their success is based on their ability to memorize the formulae presented and apply them to the questions. While memorization is useful for practice and revision, deductive teaching prioritizes this over intelligence and comprehension, making it educationally unsound.
