Teaching an Inductive Class
As a teacher you do not explicitly state any rules, but rather your job is to guide the students towards the rule getting them to become aware of it. Firstly you need to have clearly in your mind the concept or rule which needs to be discovered. Then you create a series of clear examples which demonstrate use of the rule.
Suppose you are getting the class to work out how to convert a passive to an active sentence. You might begin by writing up:
The window was broken by the boy.
Encourage speculation. Get students involved in looking for the rule, brainstorming ideas and suchlike. Of course they may well come up with alternative ideas or radical observations which are nothing to do with the rule, but that doesn’t matter as long as they are participating and thinking for themselves (or, in other words, learning to think).
There are 4 words in the sentence.
It begins with a capital letter and ends in a full stop.
There’s no object.
We don’t know who broke the window.
And so on. Then add further examples which either confirm or deny previous observations:
My car was stolen yesterday.
The cake was eaten by Elsa.
As a teacher you then need to guide them to the rule so they become aware of it. In other words, get the class to “notice” a particular rule. In the passive example above the students need to be aware that the usual SVO order has not been followed and that the subject is not always present.
Once the students have “noticed” this you can put a couple of sentences next to each other and encourage the class to work out the pattern from one to another:
The boy broke the window.
The window was broken by the boy.
Finally you can explicitly confirm the rules the students have discovered. You will not have told them these rules, you will have merely guided the class towards them.