How Discovery Learning Empowers Students

When I first started teaching, I would try to do everything: I'd be the one to talk, to model thinking something through, to explain, to raise questions, to answer them.

But the trouble with this was, I later realized: If I was doing everything, what were my students doing?

If I was the one asking questions, how was I letting them build curiosity and inquiry? If I was the one answering questions, what opportunities were they getting to analyze and explain?

Many a responsible teacher has tried to do it all. And this can work! We prepare, we lecture, we share information. Students can indeed learn from listening to a teacher lecture.

But when they're empowered to ask, analyze, and discuss themselves, they can learn even more. Even better, their engagement starts to come from a place of intrinsic motivation: they feel motivated from the inside out, driven by curiosity and the desire to solve a mystery.

I call this Discovery Learning: one of the best ways to empower students to question, analyze, collaborate, and form conclusions of their own. (If you'd rather watch/listen than read, here's a video of me explaining this teaching technique, including the same examples shown below.)

Discovery Learning: Inductive vs. Deductive Thinking and Learning

Discovery Learning involves setting up a question and letting students work out the answer, based on evidence you've shared. It's inquiry-based and prioritizes student curiosity, analysis, and problem-solving. Discovery Learning empowers students by asking them to use their intellectual analysis to propose an answer to something.

Instead of lecturing students (for example, "A leads to B"), we ask them questions about the same information (for example, "Where did B come from?" or "What impacts can A have?") With lecture-style deductive learning, students are told a theory or model, and then provided with examples to illustrate.

With Discovery Learning, students think inductively—moving from examples to what must be the underlying theory or model.

While lecture centers the teacher, Discovery Learning centers the students. When we learn from a lecture, we hear a rule, theory, or model—and then we (hopefully!) see examples. When we learn thorugh Discovery Learning, we start with those examples and do our own analysis to figure out why those examples are the way they are.

I'm currently enjoying an exciting and meaningful fall semester project, in which I meet virtually with educators from the Autonomous University of Guerrero in Mexico (shout-out to UAGro!). We discussed Discovery Learning in class last week, and I'll share some examples from these wonderful educators later in this post.

Examples from the English Language Classroom

You can use Discovery Learning to teach almost anything. From language to math to hospitality, you can always ask questions like: Why is this word used here, but not here? or Why doesn't this variable change? or What might explain this data?

If you're teaching English to second language learners, for example, you might lecture on present or past tense verbs, or you could show a list like the following, and ask students to think about WHY the sentences are in these different categories:

I like to put the sentences on the board, and then, if students are feeling confident, ask them to come up and label or circle what they see happening.

Similarly, if you're teaching how to write a sentence's subject, you may need to tell students to only state a subject one time in a sentence. In English, we typically only say a noun or pronoun—not both. Using Discovery Learning lists helps make this visual, helping students really see the issue:

You don't have to use lists labeled "correct" or "incorrect." You can use any kind of list you like! A UAGrow educator I'm working with recently shared that he used Discovery Learning to teach the articles "a" and "an" in English.

This educator listed animals starting with consonants under an "a" column on the board, and listed animals starting with vowels in another column—this one labeled "an." Then, he asked why the words were grouped like this. The conversation got started from there!

How Discovery Learning Helps Both Students and Educators

Discovery Learning has many benefits; those for students have been discussed above. If you want to watch your students turn from passive receivers of information to active creators of theories, Discovery Learning might be for you. But it has other benefits for teachers and professors too.

This teaching methodology also supports teachers, because it:

• creates motivation and engagement in your students

• allows students to think and act independently

• puts you in a position of facilitator—instead of always leading and lecturing

• creates an atmosphere of teamwork, as we all seek to solve a mystery together.

Finally, we remember things we've experienced more than things we've simply been told. Because Discovery Learning is experiential—helping students experience a rule of language, for example—concepts learned this way also become easier to remember.

With so many benefits, consider trying this teaching technique next week! A few other fantastic educators at UAGro shared with me yesterday that they'd tried Discovery Learning with their students over the last few days—with results like these:

• students actively running up to ask the teacher for help pronouncing a word

• spontaneous competitions between teams trying to solve the problems

• a total lack of nervousness about speaking aloud, even in a new language

• spontaneous debates, showing total student commitment and investment in the topic

• attracting the attention of neighbor teachers, who could overhear the high level of engagement

If you're excited to see your students get engaged with inquiry-based learning, try Discovery Learning! You can identify a topic that's the right level for your students, and then create examples for them—without sharing the theory or rule these examples are based on. Then, get them started solving the mystery, and enjoy the engagement!

Just watch out: it might get a little loud. In a good way. 😜

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To watch a video explaining this topic, click here.