Dewey's Laboratory School: Lessons for Today

"Always the spirit of service involved thinking, not just doing" (4)

In his analysis of his laboratory school, Dewey brings forward the importance of thinking in learning, rather than just learning by doing. This has shifted the language with which I associate inquiry learning. Prior to reading, the first think I think of with inquiry is 'doing'. Dewey makes it clear that this learning is actually most successfully described with the word 'thinking', connecting to making observations, inferences, and asking questions.

"Its purpose was not teaching but learning" (15)

Dewey's Ingredients and Conditions for Effective Inquiry (85-86)

Ingredients:

1. Lessons match students developmental level
2. Prep students to become citizens
3. Skills based on observation and inference

Conditions:

1. Student interest
2. Engaged thought
3. Increases new curiosity and questions
4. Time spent on effective development and connections

Big Ideas

• Students are learning and acting as effective, active, and involved citizens
• Cultivate skills to achieve this goal: problem solving, questioning, social/conversation (2-3)
• Big ideas > general knowledge of content
• Broad knowledge and citizen development connect strongly to the activation of culturally relevant teaching
• Students come to school without similar problem solving skills (3)
• Learning identifies commonalities in communities and groups of citizens
• Learning model impacts classroom community/dynamics and classroom management (122)
• Education which meets diverse needs, addressing each student's skills rather than mastery of specific content (129)
• Students think of themselves as learners, active and involved (161)
• Teachers learn theory before skill (165)
• Curriculum is infused with teaching and learning goals; pedagogy comes first (24, 31)
• Construction of lessons and activities
• Stimulus Response Theory- using student's interests as a tool (43)
• Construction of lesson plans allow students to approach and apply mathematics learning (70)
• problems are authentic and applied to student's lives
• Lessons and activities build on each other, not repeat (161)

Questions for Further Reading

How does inquiry address higher order thinking, beyond observation, inference, and questioning?

How does this model correlate with teaching organized bodies of knowledge?

How does our current curriculum and learning model in mathematics limit knowledge and experience?

How does math education become authentic and effectively applied?

What does learning in a circuit model look like?

Are these ingredients and condition currently applied in elementary math curriculum? Will I observe these conditions?