Taking the inquiry out of Inquiry Maths
Andrew Blair,
Inquiry Maths,
May 06, 2019
This pair of articles illustrates quite nicely the debate between two very different approaches, the one based on the instructivist paradigm, the other based on the inquiry-based paradigm. I read Andrew Blair's first, but you can read the post he replies to, 'Teaching an Inquiry Maths Problem', by Naveen Rizvi. My preference is for the inquiry-based model, but that isn't the point here. Rather, it's that (as Blair states) the two approaches actually constitute two very different subjects that use the same subject matter. One - the instructivist approach - teaches mathematics as deductive and procedural, while the other - the inquiry approach - teaches it as inductive and experimental. One is based on logic and rules, the other is based on pattern recognition. If you just want to do math, then the instructivist approach will work fine. But if you want to be a mathematician, then you need the inquiry method.
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