Inductive Learning

Description

Inductive Learning is a strategy that takes a group of vocabulary terms or concepts that have the potential to be related to one another through some kind of shared characteristic and facilitates the grouping of these concepts. After grouping, students are encouraged to make predictions about the coming unit or lesson based on their work. Students are able to more deeply understand the independent terms or concepts because they understand how they are related to one another. Inductive learning includes the following steps:

1. Provide students with terms, concepts, or something else related to the current lesson.
2. Students spend a specific amount of time in groups examining the items to identify potential groupings. Throughout the process, the teacher is continually encouraging students to identify ways that categories can be combined to create new and larger generalizations.
3. Students then take each group they’ve created and label them with as much detail as possible.
4. Students create a prediction chart that they will use when directly exploring the content to be presented in the unit or lesson. This chart includes a space for students to identify evidence that supports or refutes their predictions.

Why it works...

Inductive Learning is all about identifying similarities and differences between terms in an effort to build meaning for different terms. When a student understands how terms are interrelated, they are able to more deeply understand the meaning behind the terms.

How to plan it...

1. Select a text or other resource about the topic to be learned that can provide many items for students to categorize.
2. Identify the most important concepts you’d like students to take away from the activity.
3. Find up to 40 items in the text that can conceivably be categorized into one of the categories established in step 2.
4. Encourage students to organize items into logical groupings based on criteria that can be checked and verified. Also encourage students to develop predictions about the text based on the patterns they see in their groupings.
5. If appropriate, allow students to work collaboratively the entire time, or after an initial period of individual work time.
6. Provide students with the text or resource to be used to check their groupings and predictions.
7. Debrief and share the results of the activity as a whole class.

Tech Integration...

Create a slide deck to distribute through Google Classroom, making a copy for each student. The first slide in the deck contains all of the items students will be categorizing (If this doesn’t sound like a good idea for your class, you can also distribute the terms another way). Students will then create a slide for each category they identify, adding the related terms on each slide. Students will then create a final slide to create a table with their predictions for the upcoming unit or lesson.