as constructivists, teachers strike the delicate balance between teaching for fact and skill acquisition and teaching for independent and expert thinking
(1) the mimetic,
in which students are expected to acquire facts and skills from drill and practice exercises, and ...
(2) the transformative,
a type of teaching that seeks to influence the attitudes and interests of the learners, evoking changes in perspective.
In the mimetic tradition, teachers disseminate knowledge, & students receive it.
In the transformative, the student is the actor, & the teacher is the mediator.
I suspect that this dichotomy, which characterizes the current debate on teaching, is a mistaken conception. The key principle is to balance the extremes. Alone, either extreme is insufficient preparation for a world that demands specific knowledge and skills, but also attitudes and interests conducive to vision and creativity. To use a computer to solve complex problems creatively, for example, we must first load the software in precise accordance with the manufacturer's instructions. To decide whether to wrap a potato for baking with the shiny side of the aluminum foil in or out, we need to know some specifics about thermal absorption and radiation. Both instances require information and intellect, fact and interpretation.
the primary question for the teacher, therefore, is how to help students build a foundation of skills and information while they simultaneously use their creative, intellectual abilities to solve real problems and incidentally develop positive dispositions toward such endeavors. The powerful concept of constructivism can help us find solutions to this question. By taking a constructivist approach, educators can avoid the either/or syndrome and balance the two traditions.
individual constructions of reality
constructivists believe that knowledge is the result of individual constructions of reality. From their perspective, learning occurs thru the continual creation of rules and hypotheses to explain what is observed. The need to create new rules and formulate new hypotheses occurs when the student's present conceptions of reality are thrown out of balance by disparities between those conceptions and new observations (for example ... discrepant events).
constructivism describes an internal psychological process
In the classroom, students and teachers negotiate both their means of acquiring credibility as members of group and their emerging understanding of the content of the course.
the new understandings are stops along the path of learning that occur when equilibrium is temporarily restored. This process occurs in both the teachers and the students, in both academic and social contexts.
nevertheless, constructivism is not a euphemism for "anything goes." Learning content and skills is still the educational goal. But "the critical feature is HOW the knowledge is acquired," as Siege reminds us. Students must develop the necessary content-bound understandings without sacrificing the intellectual autonomy essential for the construction of meaning. a teacher's daily challenge, then, is to transform ideas into action. The ideas often come from the district's philosophy statement, grade level or curriculum guidelines, teachers' manuals, the principal's yearly charge to the staff, and one's own vision. The transformations of these ideas into classroom practice are highly personalized endeavors. To make these transformations ably and with insight requires content area knowledge, communication skills, and a vision of what intellectual autonomy in a developing thinker looks and feels like. Thus, the teacher's personal pedagogy is critical to the education of students as developing thinkers.
sigel asserts our need to understand the role of social interactions in how teachers come to construe the practice of teaching. If teachers are to set up classrooms where inquiry is encouraged, then they must be educated in ways that encourage inquiry. The willingness and competency of the teacher to seek and find meaning thru direct experience and reflection influences how she or he will structure and mediate that learning environment.
our abilities to foster student inquiry and research are enhanced by the degree to which we envision it ... and to the degree that we ourselves inquire and research. The teacher's role, then, is twofold.
First,
teachers must continue to develop knowledge of content ... of genetics, numeration, or political conflicts, as examples.
Second,
at the same time, teachers must continually analyze and reconstruct ideas of pedagogy ... knowledge of how to teach these subjects.
the intellectual opportunities the teacher offers the students are carefully constructed invitations that maximize the possibility that new conceptual learning will occur.
indeed, Duckworth (see other article) observes that teachers are in a position to pursue questions about the development of understandings that no one else could pursue in the same way. She goes on to describe teaching as research.
"this kind of researcher would be a teacher in the sense of caring about some part of the world and how it works enough to want to make it accessible to others: he or she would be fascinated by the questions of how to engage people in it and how people make sense of it ..."
concept introduction,
practice,
application, and
further exploration, if time allows.
but models of learning based on constructivist principles most often suggest a sequence of lessons in which exploration comes first. the Learning Cycle Model of exploration-invention-discovery (now re-named: exploration - concept introduction - concept application) which has a long history in the field of science teaching, is an example of constructivist-based education. Using this model, a teacher designs opportunities for students to experience the lesson concepts thru direct encounters with materials or information (exploration lesson). The teacher next formally introduces the concept to be considered, usually using new terms and introducing new information and different ways of thinking (concept introduction). Finally, the teacher provides further activities that involve the same concepts (concept application). The purpose of this sequence is to give students of subjects other than science the opportunity to express their points of views and grapple with important issues in the topic. This creates the intellectually fertile basis for the introduction of a new concept. Teachers are now using this model where they once used more mimetic plans; for example, to teach students to use library resources, to develop physical education skills, and to play musical instruments.
teachers in Shoreham-Wading River School District (Long Island) generated the descriptors of constructivist teaching practices listed in the sidebar as part of a large-scale in service education and research project. The project, originally called the Cognitive Levels Matching Project (based on purported physiological brain growth patterns), is now known as the Child Developmental Study Seminar Series. The list is an evolving document that represents the most widely used practices of teachers who described themselves as constructivists.
of curriculum around primary concepts: the teacher enters the classroom with one or two big ideas, not with a long list of stepping-stone skills and objectives. For an entire academic year, for instance, students in 6th grade mathematics class studied ratios and proportions. The lessons were designed to develop students' proportional reasoning abilities. The objectives were explored ... not 'covered' ... in the natural and spontaneous context of students' thinking. While comparing the radii of circles given the circumferences, for example, students ASKED for a review lesson on the division of decimals. They had come to the mature conclusions that to solve a real problems, they needed an arithmetic skills. They demonstrated, incidentally, that when students solve real problems, their thinking recapitulates the development of "expert" thought. Thru inquiry into important concepts, the class achieves the objectives listed in the text or curriculum guidelines, and in a deeper, more memorable way.
it may be based on faulty assumptions,
lack of information, or
incorrect data
[ or improper processing ].
And , as most teachers know, the rendering of "correct" explanations does not necessarily change the child's misconceptions. [ i.e. 'telling the student the right answer doesn't change the misconception ].
the teaching of concept, therefore, is not effective unless the child's present understanding of the concept is explicitly explored. The students must confront any inconsistency between their notions and the data in front of them before they can entertain the teacher's ideas. Thus, the task of the teacher, after coming to understand the nature of the students' present notions, is to structure a classroom in which students experience disequilibrium and, subsequently, self-regulation.
again, remember that constructivism refers to an internal psychological process. The teacher cannot demand that a student see an inconsistency and accommodate his or her thinking by developing a new mental scheme. Rather, the teacher offers intellectual opportunities carefully constructed as invitations that maximize the possibility that new conceptual learning will occur.
Within a context of growth and cooperation, conflict is the source of developmental progress. It is not the teacher's intent to structure a classroom in which conflict is avoided. Rather, it is the teacher's job to help students negotiate the frictions that inevitably arise in settings that provoke them to challenge ideas, most often their own.
reinventing the wheel
altho constructivism as a guiding principle in education is receiving more attention today than in the past, much confusion persists over its message, and its implications. Suppes, a critic of what he calls the romanticism of this approach, asks, "what are you going to do, rediscover the wheel?" The answer is "yes." In the ideal educational setting, students will rediscover the wheel, reinvent long division, rediscover the horrors of war, and reinvent government.
for an example of the usefulness of reinventing the wheel, consider this instance. Sixth graders were trying to determine whether there was any relationship between the radius of a circle and its circumference. After experimenting with construction paper, some string, a ruler, and a pencil, one student said:
"I think weÕve come up with something.
If you take the number around a circle and divide it by the line going across, no matter how big the circle is, you always get about 3 !"
The child, approximating the value of pi, had see it as a ratio of two other features of a circle.
Who do you think will be more likely to understand and remember the meaning of pi ... a child introduced to the concept as an element in a formula or this discovering child?
constructivism doesn't say, as critics claim, that you can't teach people anything, it guides us in finding out how to teach them. Constructivism reminds us that order exists only in the minds of people, so when we as teachers impose our order on students, we rob them of the opportunity to create knowledge and understanding themselves. Our task, then, is to understand and nurture the learning and development of our students. We must not do for them what they can, and must, do for themselves.