Dewey's ideas about thinking and teaching methods and their contemporary value.

Answer: Dewey was quite unimpressed with the traditional teaching method centered on teachers, textbooks and classrooms, and thus he advocated the teaching method of "learning by doing", specifically a method of thinking in the context of experience. Dewey's thinking is introspective thinking, meaning that the problems of an empirical situation for repeated, serious, continuous thinking, its function is to seek a new situation, the difficulties solved, doubts eliminated, questions answered. In addition, Dewey also believed that the method of thinking is more important in accumulating knowledge and at the same time cultivating one's wisdom. Since thinking starts from uncertain and problematic situations, the cultivation of thinking ability must first provide a suitable situation, Dewey believed that experience, activity-based curriculum can provide the conditions for just such a situation, from which he applied his five-step method of thinking directly to teaching methods, forming a five-step process of teaching: First, the student has to have a real experience of the context - -to have a continuum of interest in the activity itself: second, within this situation a real problem arises as a stimulus for thinking: third, he has to take possession of the intellectual information and engage in the necessary observations to deal with the problem: fourth, he must be responsible for the methodical unfolding of the solution to the problem that he has come up with: fifth, he has the opportunity and the need to test his conception of the problem through application to test his ideas, to make the meaning of the idea clear, and to allow him to discover for himself whether they are valid or not. As a representative figure of modern education, Dewey's teaching ideas played a theoretical guiding role in the reform of teaching in the United States and even in the whole world in the first half of the 20th century. Today, when China is removing the shortcomings of traditional education and implementing quality education, the reasonable components of Dewey's reflective thinking are in line with the direction of China's education reform, and it is of great significance for educators to establish a modern concept of teaching and reforming classroom teaching.