Deductive vs inductive reasoning
Partially inspired by the thread about whether or not the current generation of students are able to think for themselves...
Short version of the question: What are your thoughts on incorporating deductive vs inductive reasoning into your lessons? Do you find one more beneficial / effective than the other? Is it important to have both within a sequence? How capable or successful are your students when they attempt each of these?
Deductive reasoning = students are taught key rules or principles, and then apply these to a set of examples or problems.
Inductive reasoning = students are given a set of examples from real life and use these to try to work out a rule or principle underlying them.
Additional context: I am a Latin teacher who will soon be moving to a Head of Department role at an inner-city comprehensive school. Within the UK at least, there's a big emphasis on trying to teach Latin grammar inductively - e.g. give students a passage that contains verbs in different tenses, help them to translate it using context or glossed vocab, then see if they can work out the rules for how to form those tenses. There is some research to support this, but it's mostly based on modern languages rather than Latin itself. I personally prefer teaching with a more deductive method and find it more effective, but before I try to shift the curriculum at my new school towards a deductive approach, I wanted to get some ideas about how deductive and inductive reasoning might work in other subjects to see if there's something that I'm missing.