Methods of teaching

CHAPTER 2. TYPES OF TEACHING METHODS
2.1. Methods of Teaching
Mental modeling is a powerful technique that is on a high cognitive level. Precisely for that reason, it is something that you should try to use with your students at every opportunity. But practice first! The keys to using this technique are modeling thinking that your students can understand and then providing them with immediate opportunities to apply what they have learned. Having your students explain their own mental models or “I wonder . . .” models aloud will help clarify the process for them and allow you to assess their understanding.
Discovery Learning
Discovery learning is an approach to instruction that focuses on students’ personal experiences as the foundation for conceptual development. It is unlikely that children will walk into your classroom with all of the necessary experiences that relate to the concepts you want to teach, so the challenge is to provide your students with the opportunities for experiences they need in the context of discovery. That is, allowing students to find the information for themselves by virtue of some activity you have provided. The students in your class will then share a common experience that you can develop as it relates to the concept under consideration. In essence, we are cheating just a bit because, from an instructional perspective the idea is to have children discover what we want them to discover. It’s new to them, of course, but it is all part of the strategy for the teacher.
Discovery learning channels the natural inquisitiveness of children (and the natural inquisitiveness that remains in adults) by providing structure to the experience without imposing unnecessary structure on the thinking. That is, unlike the science experiments that you did in high school that were “wrong” if they didn’t come out the way the book said they should, discovery learning encourages children to engage in the activity and document what does happen.
Even with structured activities in the classroom, twenty students will experience the activity in twenty different ways. Because of that, for discovery learning to be pedagogically sound it must be accompanied by a structure that goes beyond the discovery phase of the exercise. Such a structure, or framework, is intended to clarify the experience in terms of the concept being taught.
Four-Phase Learning Cycle

1.