The first section of this paper addresses the question of whether composition teachers should present heuristic models for students to assimilate or should attempt to elicit directly from students the tacit heuristics they already use. It suggests that creating heuristic models in the classroom has the advantage of teaching cooperative inquiry, and it describes how such models can be evoked directly from students. The second section provides a brief review of the literature on evaluating heuristic procedures, with emphasis on J. Lauer's concept of "metatheory." Discussed Lauer's three evaluation criteria of transcendency, flexible direction, and generative power. The third section describes a classroom experiment in which the composition instructor attempted to elicit heuristic models from students, using an inquiry approach that involved the following procedures: (1) range-finding, (2) categorizing questions, (3) defining categories and purpose, (4) comparing student categories, (5) sampling questions, (6) presenting new information, and (7) redefining categories and purpose. The last section concludes that teachers should be concerned less with trying to teach students the invention process and more with utilizing their own inventiveness in staging inquiries. (AEA)