The mathematician Hugo Rossi once gave a talk entitled “The Goal of Teaching is Learning, Not Teaching.” Look around, if your students are actively problem solving, thinking, arguing, reading, drawing, computing, building, making conjectures, compiling data, trying to create proofs and communicating, then they are working as mathematicians do. You help by setting a tone, being supportive, asking questions, reassuring, clarifying,… They need you for this. But if you take over more, they will retreat into being less active. We find that most days our students are entirely unaware that it is time for class to end. We have to tell them it is time to pack up. This is symbolic of a good level of teacher intervention.
There are many ways in which the teacher/facilitator is active during an inquiry-based class, but the tools are entirely different from the tools you use during a great lecture. Check out the conversation tools and our assessment page to get an idea what your new "control knobs" might looks like.
