Herbartianism

Herbartianism is an educational method built on the ideas of German educator Johann Friedrich Herbart, though it did not take shape as an organized movement until roughly twenty five years after his death in 1841, when two German schools of followers developed and popularized his ideas. Its core is a five step lesson structure: preparation, which connects new material to what students already know; presentation of the new material in concrete form; association, which compares it with prior knowledge; generalization, which extends the concrete material into broader concepts; and application, which integrates the concepts into the whole of a student's life rather than treating them as narrowly useful facts. The method also stressed the integrity of each student's individuality and the place of moral education within academic teaching, and it supplied much of the vocabulary educational theory used through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.