"Matching Instructional Strategies to Student Needs"

          I was reading Chapter 7 in our text book Social Studies for the Elementary and Middle Grades and I was interested in what the difference is between the teaching strategies and how they benefit students in different ways.

       Direct Instruction
In direct instruction, the control is mostly in the teacher's hand. The teacher provides directions and motivation for the students, and opportunities for the students to practice their skills in different situations. The teacher also provides continuous feedback to students when they answer questions correctly. The main way to teach direct instruction is through lecture, and closed, narrow questions. 
Direct instruction requires external motivation, which students may lack, and classroom management is also key when teaching through the direct instruction. One of the main problems with direct instruction is that it produces lower levels of learning...recalling and memorizing. This makes sense because students have difficulty focusing and comprehending all the information the teacher is saying through lecture style. It really isn't easy to sit in a seat for an extended period time and listen to a teacher talk and talk all period; your mind is bound to wander and have difficulty focusing solely on what the teacher is saying.

       Guided Discovery 
In this teaching method, the teacher creates a problem, provides materials, and determines the procedures, but leaves the students to investigate, collect & analyze data, and evaluate results towards the problem. Students are provided with materials and time and use several activities to solve the problem. The students are the ones doing most of the work, while the teacher simply provides directions and asks questions to get students started and on the right path. 
Guided discovery differs from direct instruction because more control is placed on the students. Students are doing more things on their own and it is less sitting there and listening. Students are actively participating and researching a solution to the problem. Students also get to work together more during this method than in the direct instruction. This is a good method because  students get a little bit more responsibility and are being actively engaged in the lesson. Students have more responsibility and will learn how researching and analyzing data is key to solving a problem. 

       Inquiry&Problem Solving/Decision-Making 
This method is similar to guided discovery, however even more responsibility is placed on the students because they are creating their own problem versus having the teacher provide them with the problem. Students are also in charge of finding materials and figuring out the procedures necessary to solve the problem they have created. 
This method tends to motivating because students are doing basically everything on their own. They are creating their own problem, they're researching the information, they're figuring out the steps to solving the problem, and that's exciting for a student. I know, since I'm still a student, nothing feels greater than accomplishing something on your own instead of the teacher just telling you the answer.

These three methods are similar in some ways, but vary in a bunch of different ways. To me, personally, the inquiry&problem solving/decision making method sound the best to me. I'm a doer, I learn by doing things for myself, I don't learn well from sitting in a room and listening to a teacher lecture me for forty minutes. I lose focus, I get lost in the topic, my mind wanders, but if I'm doing things for myself, if I create the problem and the steps to solve it, I'm more likely to take more away from the experience than just sitting and listening to a lecture.