Teaching Rational Inquiry

Elementary education reform is improving steadily in our country. A great diversity of course structure, the richness of course contents and the flexible of learning methods. The ways of communication in education is transferred from monologue to dialogue. All of those changes bring unprecedented strikes and challenges to the teachers. The complexity of the teaching activity needs more and more teaching rationality to create vigor in the class.Teaching, as a dominant means to take educational activities, is supposed to be filled with rationality and endowed with sound, reasonable, transparent rationality so as to get conscious demands to guide and regulate. Correspondingly, teachers to take teaching activities are necessary to form reasonable teaching rationality in order to examine, evaluate and remake their own teaching ideas, ideology and concrete teaching actions. But from the angle of teaching practice, teaching rationality appears to be vacant and dissimilated now. Because of much inertia in everyday life, on one hand, everyday teaching life of most teachers or most time of everyday teaching life is used for teaching experiences, habits and general knowledge. On the other hand, universal shortage of teaching rationality leads to teachers lost in themselves, querying and will be discouraged to criticize and judge. Consequently, teaching will take on a look as following: lazy, sluggish, conservative and with no creation.. Because of instrumental rationality'offside, present teaching is branded with technologicism so that teaches are shackled by operationizations of teaching aims, formulizations of teaching procedure and quantitizations of teaching evaluations. As a result, teachers becomes nails of teaching machines which leads to ossified teaching. In the course of teaching, as teachers are only able to see materials without people, there will be never values and meanings of teaching. In addition, due to institutional rationality'overstep, teaching will be bonded into institutionism, and teaching will be so bureaucratized, colonized and regulationized that regulations and control become main goals of teaching, this leads to loss of soul ,wisdom and freedom.The"repick"and"reconstruction"of teaching rationality is to make teaching aims go from"given"to"generate", teacher-student relation go from"control"to"conversation",teaching contents go from"static"to"activational", teaching research go from"what will do"to"method inspection"on the base of teachers'study, rethinking, cooperation and comprehension. Teaching lubricated by rational spirits will go from experiences, habits and general knowledge to revisiting, examination and comprehension. At the same time teachers will break away from the lair of"artisan"and"technicians"to get dignity and values of their own, will be freed from the cage of system and regulations to get appropriate status approval.All in all, the advocating of teaching rationality is not to negate the non- rationality, the complete teaching is supposed to integrate teaching rationality and non-rationality. The teaching embraced teaching rationality and non- rationality will be not only an rational exploration but also a poetically charming journey.