Moving the inquiry on, we lead the students toward information that forms a domain or is within a given domain or territory. We may begin by presenting information to them or by helping them gather or produce data, because inductive operations involve organizing data, pulling it apart, and reorganizing it in the search for ideas. Thus, collecting data occurs early, and new data may be added or discarded as an inquiry proceeds.
What information will be gathered for analysis, from which disciplines, and in what forms? What material will students burrow into in their inquiry?
Will it be a set of words? Poems? Picture storybooks? Opening paragraphs of books or magazine articles? Cartoons? Arithmetic problems? Paintings? Maps?
Information about different species of animals?
Within the inductive model of teaching, we call the information presented or gathered data sets. These data sets are assemblies of information. This infor-mation comes in myriad forms: objects, literature and prose in its many forms, the results of experiments, perceptions, and combinations of various forms. All can be assembled into data sets. Almost any set of related information can become a data set: numbers 1– 100, modes of transportation, major cities and their locations, power plants and their locations, accident rates and locations, particular jobs and ethnic prejudice, stars and their locations. In this phase of the model, we bring the learners and the data together.
As learners and data interact, expected and unexpected results transpire.
We are born with both the drive and capacity to sort the things we perceive, and we find connections among all kinds of things. The creation of the items we call constellations came from the linking of points of light to creatures and legends, which seems an improbable connection from some perspectives but represents a natural function of the human need for understanding. Your stu-dents will make many improbable connections; they will often see things in the data that you did not see or make connections that have little utility. For example, in a set of poems students may notice that a number of poems have the word yellow in them, that a number of poems mention foreign countries, that a number of them all begin with the word when. At other times, students will notice information that you missed, or make useful connections that were not visible to you.
Though we do not want to inhibit our students’ spontaneous ability to seek unlikely connections, when we organize them for inquiry we develop boundar-ies for the search for information. Thus we create, or help them create, sets of data within the domains selected for academic study. For example, if we decide to help upper- or middle- grade students learn to use metaphoric devices in their writing, then they will have to understand categories of metaphors, be able to produce them as they write, and assess the effects of doing so. The data
sets thus need to include examples of metaphors as well as other devices so that students can distinguish them from metaphors. To build the set, we draw on samples of writing, possibly sentences, where authors have used metaphors and other devices such as personification or hyperbole.
Similarly, if we want students to be able to generate prepositional phrases, they will need to comprehend the nature of such phrases and practice produc-ing them— our higher- order objective. The data sets will need to include many prepositional phrases and other structures, such as clauses, that need to be distinguished from them.
Let’s look at how the two phases we have discussed thus far— the domain identification phase and the data collection phase— might work out in the pri-mary grades, the upper grades, and the middle school.
Primary Grades
In grade 1, we may lead students to the domain of phonetic structures and provide them with a set that contains the subdomain of the sounds represented by the letter c. The objective is that they comprehend the rules governing the sounds of c and be able to use those rules in reading and spelling. The data set might look like this:
cat city cake
catch canyon cotton
ice cream October nice
Carl ceiling cable
Christine choo- choo cement
race accident act
face duck cold
mice bookcase luck
chicken coat actor
Or we might have the students look through picture storybooks and find words that contain the letter c. Or working from devices such as the picture word inductive model (see Chapter 5), we might have them select the words contain-ing c from a large word set.
Similarly, we can lead students to the study of plurals by presenting a set of nouns, some of which are plural and some of which are singular. The objec-tive is that they develop categories containing singular and plural words and develop the skill to use those categories when reading and writing. That set might look like this:
book/ books word/ words library/ libraries
city/ cities sentence/ sentences window/ windows
girl/ girls boy/ boys crayon/ crayons
ChaPter three Learning to Learn Inductively 51
woman/ women church/ churches lady/ ladies story/ stories farmer/ farmers slipper/ slippers cat/ cats teacher/ teachers table/ tables child/ children principal/ principals kitten/ kittens
face/ faces man/ men bookcase/ bookcases
desk/ desks chair/ chairs blouse/ blouses
pan/ pans party/ parties cake/ cakes
Again, we might send the students on a hunt for such words or have them sort them from a larger set that includes many types of words. (As an aside, we might do exactly the same thing with older students who have needs in the area of phonetic and structural analysis.)
Upper elementary Grades and Middle School
To lead students into the domain of Native American Peoples, where we want them to comprehend the types of tribes, their differences, and the conse-quences to the different tribes as a result of European settlement, we might present a data set containing information about a number of tribes. The data set would include where the tribes lived before European settlement began, their numbers then and now, their type of life (hunting and gathering or agri-cultural, nomadic or settled, leadership structure), and any pictures and arti-facts available. Alternatively, we could present the students with the names of the tribes, plus any good sources they find, and have them locate the informa-tion and create the data set.
enumerating and Labeling Data
The data in the set need to be labeled or numbered so that we can keep track of them. In the upper elementary and middle school sets described previ-ously, the items are numbered so that they can be conveniently referred to.
Pictures and objects can be numbered, tagged by color, or provided with mean-ingful names. For example, if primary students visit a number of local busi-nesses and take notes about them, the data about each business can be labeled with the names of the businesses: bakery, delicatessen, shoe store, and so on.
Rocks from the seashore can be tagged with blue labels, rocks from the mountain with yellow labels, rocks from the grasslands with green labels, and so forth.
Lines from poems by various poets can be labeled with numbers, along with the poet’s names and the titles of the poems.
Enumeration or labeling is extremely important. In a set of any size, we simply cannot manage to communicate with terms like “the one in the middle but slightly left.” As we categorize, placing items together in groups, commu-nication is facilitated because we can say, “Items 4, 7, and 17 go together; they have X in common.” The listener can refer to those numbers, track down those items, and follow our line of reasoning.