Stephen Downes commented on a couple of articles about instructivist math instruction vs. inquiry based approaches. It was the final comment that caught me a bit by surprise
[quote cite=”Stephen Downes” url=”http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=69447″]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.[/quote]Generally, whenever I hear about math instruction the arguments or reasoning for taking a specific approach is not as clear as what I think Stephen captured in just two sentences.