Brad, over at HUNBlog posted My Two Cents on Constructivism, and he asked,
I don’t know the extent to which constructivism can work for math education as an isolated strategy. Can it be useful in math education to some extent. Probably. Is it useful in language arts? Probably, but just how and to what degree I don’t know.
A thorough response to this question would require a book-length piece. I tried to leave this as a comment in Brad’s blog, but his site is acting up, and it told me that the comment wasn’t deliverable (Sorry, Brad, I can’t remember exactly what the error message looked like.) So, here’s what I said. We’ll see if the site accepts a trackback.
I have several links to information about constructivism saved here.
Questions about whether it “works” for particular purposes, frames constructivism as essentially an approach, or a strategy for teaching. However, if we see constructivism as a general theory about how people learn, it has broad applicability and, indeed, suggests certain approaches to teaching. Constructivism is linked with schema theory, which describes the structural foundation for human knowing.
Any theory of the world maps limitations and opportunities for our activity. The theory of gravity, for example, has profound implications for what we can and can not do 
Constructivism, in a purely theoretical sense, has it’s downside for schools. One of the questions teachers need to ask themselves about constructivism is to what extent it is useful for school, which may be a different question than asking if it works for particular domains of knowledge.
As a general learning theory, constructivism should apply to all learning. However, since any model is useless beyond its design limits, and school in its current incarnation imposes certain conditions on learning, a purely constructivist approach to school teaching is unlikely to produce satisfactory results. The teacher, after all, is the authority figure, and is obliged to make some decisions about what will and will not occur in the classroom.
Resolving contradictions in teaching is often a matter of learning how to have your hands in hot and cold water simultaneously, and to still know which is which. Piaget pointed out that the imbalance of power inherent in the teacher/student relationship made constructivist practice difficult for traditional school settings.
True knowledge construction involves a degree of intellectual autonomy that is problematic with large groups of children in a public institutional setting. This is not to say that children don’t construct knowledge in such environments, but rather that it is difficult to direct their knowledge construction. People are comprehending all the time – but not necessarily learning what we intend for them to learn. President Bush, for example, is struggling with this inconvenient truth right now.
The best analogy I have for constructivist practice in school came from a paper about the development of mathematics discourse in classrooms. Magdalene Lampert said that a teacher is like a dance instructor, sometimes leading, sometimes following, and sometimes dancing with students. The article provides a vivid picture of a fifth-grade math classroom. It shows how a shift in the authority structure of the mathematics classroom invites students to become arbiters of meaning and correctness. Lampert, in her findings, acknowledges that while her approach was more effective for some students than for others, a shift in classroom discourse did occur.
That brings the discussion around to individual student characteristics, and whether constructivism “works” for everyone. The answer is, of course, no. Many students won’t be bothered going to very much trouble for school. They don’t see the point, or they’ve been taught to expect that teachers will and should tell them what to know. Active effort is required of students who are constructing knowledge, and if they don’t assume responsibility for school learning, little or nothing happens. Of course, we could say the same thing about students in a classroom where content is explicitly delivered as in days of olde. Effort is required if a student is going to gain from the experience, but a different kind of effort – compliance will suffice where, in a constructive environment, initiative is required. In some cases students need to be lead and danced with, more than followed.
Discriminating and differentiating among students’ beliefs and inclinations, as well as their capabilities, is the art of teaching. There are no standards for learners, and until kids come to us in cookie-cutter batches, we’ll have to make decisions about how to help them develop their potential.
It’s all constructivism to me, just variations in form and degree. You might not see it happening if you don’t spend some time hanging out with me. Each year I do my part to move my students toward an active stance with learning. It’s a revolution and it’s happening out of sight, because as Gill Scott Heron said a few years back, the revolution will not be televised (still true).
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I once watched a Constructivist in action in South Central LA, in Watts, in 1983……And yes, I think it’s a methodological approach that can work for every child, very well, provided it’s directed by someone who has creative capacity…
…so I’ll reconstruct times long ago……In A Plague of Papercuts….
My husband likes to generally imply he cannot remember the past, and his recall can be selective on occasion. It can also be really good when motivated. One thing I remember pretty plainly on meeting his class arriving at his school in South Central LA in 1983 was his “new girl” and one who looked a little bit like an Eskimo. Jack’s class was bilingual and English speakers; can you say Mexican, Guatemalan, El Salvadorian and black students? It earned him Mr. Crooks, a bilingual aide, and a group of students that were Mexican American to a much greater extent proportionally than the class I eventually had at his site.
There were strong characters in his class. Going in, I noticed first a new little girl and on her forehead was the largest bulge you ever saw. Rather like an enormous goose-egg, it swelled before your eyes. On seeing me look up, he shrugged his shoulders and said that it was something he needed to address, she was new, just arrived from Mexico. He noticed when she put her head down it grew larger. (Jack had so many kinds of issues to address in this job, especially for a first year 4th grade teacher with 38 students.)
By February he had decorated his room completely in cut shapes taped over walls and ceiling. Swirling purple shapes forming animals and designs evoking Matisse, if Matisse had done a room in cut outs and used a great deal of effort getting up to the ceiling. He labeled everything in the environment in English and Spanish on index cards in a constructivist process with his children. As their vocabulary increased, and need to expand it increased, so did designs and subsequent labels.
We had no books there and no access to text. If the kids used the word he put it up on the walls, illustrated with in design context, in two languages. So vocabulary evolved as did the decoration, each day, and week, as they needed a word and learned it within the context of their room, lives, story telling and days thinking together.
We really were people locked into empty rooms. The evolving art was fun for them, I heard them talking about how it was looking, changing, heard a lot of English and Spanish language visiting into the room for singing and hearing them conjure up what they “saw” in it. I still know quite a bit of everyday classroom objects in Spanish by recalling the words taped up which you looked at when we did things combining our classes or going in after-school.
He and his kids would use these labels in games; he used games all the time to format the English as a second language learning, his math and his program. The kids got so involved in the games, in a very real way. I tended to lecture. I loved the designs all over the environment. But like many things in this first year there, a day came when those labels and designs became an issue for Jack.
One day Mrs. Keyes a wonderful mentor teacher assigned to help us along, came in to tell Jack the labels had to go and so did the designs. Apparently there were “bulletin board” Standards in LA. For under-performing kids, he was told, visual stimulus had to be a “minimum” confined to the one small bulletin board and having the assigned border-size. To minimize distraction from their learning. Learning that needed a high amount of rote practice and specificity. I can tell you I had visited a great many rooms at the school and that wasn’t going on in their rooms. Maybe in those rooms it was a phenomenal tribute to a teacher store border design mill.
It’s almost humorous today in my NCLB realities as I’m forced to put up “focus walls” to see this recycle from our past. At the time it felt insane to us. Recall we had no books, no construction paper, nothing to work from, empty desks and kids who were often dealing down the street making more money than we did or getting shot dead. Mrs. Keyes was the conduit for the “word” to him. And it wasn’t the designs really that were the “issue”, it was how he was approaching learning, he was standing for something pandora-like and the administration at that site was having none of it. It seemed that bilingual labeling put Spanish up on the wall for his English learners to acquire and that wasn’t allowed within the code either.
“Distracting them” was concocted to justify letting him be served a big piece of humble pie. His methodology of constructivist learning had to go. Ironically the floral work in my room, outside the one board limit certainly and grounded in a love affair with those awesome Birds of Paradise was praised to the skies by the very same people, and my room even used as a site for meetings of teachers and administrators. Anyway I do recall Mrs. Keyes relaying this remove immediately message to him and his subsequent refusal to take it down. And he remembers for me, she went in and took it down over the weekend. To save his insubordination. He said he felt sad for Mrs. Keyes and for the kids. I don’t know what he told his children about the sudden barren walls, probably very little. All the rest of his career I never saw him “decorate” his room to that degree again.
I guess it connects to this time. He was trained as an artist and it would be nice to think kids could see an artist creating. On the theory of “underachieving kid’s visual needs,” I think twenty years has given me room to comment that it was uplifting in a graffiti scarred hell on earth to be uplifted through art. No matter what your level. Beauty is a force unto itself. And constructing meaning for children an art that should be as prized as Leonardo or Monet. Few do it so well, few can bring such depth to students. But when people do not know….as we have seen with art through the years, it’s easier to reject it. And in a way it challenges every construct you hold. That is by definition it’s purpose. I would imagine in math the approach would be one that would be used in conjunction with a process far removed from rote repetition and replay of others work, it might be a way to dynamically explore math meaning through creation anew of the theories, no?
Eventually Jack helped the girl with the head lump. It turned out to be an aneurysm, and she went to Martin Luther King Hospital for it. We would drive by that hospital in 1983 and see lines around the block. Seriously I used to say to him, Jack, these lines must mean heath care is sorely needed here. Can you imagine people lining the block in Beverly Hills? I see it symbolically how we stood shoulder to shoulder with the insignificance of a room paper design and a bulge that could burst and kill a child. I wonder which got more adult attention at the school. All this meeting in a room that was learning decoding, reading without books, how to be a person and how to exist. Quite a year he had. Always in a process I see as construction of our meanings in this public school that went on to be designated “Ten Worst”.. Why were we there, what could we do?
Jack concurrently can recall every child’s name in that room, 20 plus years ago, room number, and has a set of photos he took of the kids from which I did several drawings. One child, Ted, stands alone in them. Ted was a child, I cannot tell his story. He was interested in being smart, twisted, put a pencil in Jack’s eye and was going to be a leader one way or another. I don’t think he ever believed in Santa and I’m pretty sure he dealt crack at the gas station. He was more than I could handle. My husband had a project there. Ted would look at me and once quietly told me that my husband had been shot on the recess yard and then laughed, “just kidding”. He enjoyed engaging my husband clearly. Jack was in charge of his domain. Ted perceived that, allowed it, because Jack is pretty good at giving back a certain acceptable level of power and a way to use it in appropriately monitored fashion. That, or he had a certain edgy quality Ted found worth looking into. He could deliver on showing a child that education had a value. Ted, I think, wanted to learn. What he was going to do with it one can only think might be better not to know.
Mr. Crooks, his aide, and Jack had a great way of relating. One was so calm he was nearly asleep and the other was palpable. I think it was a good team. Together they had a difficult task. The bilingual kids were in a domain that was changing to accommodate their needs. It was a challenging class for any teacher. That first year for him, his initiation, contained about every issue American education struggles to meet, race, economics, leadership, immigrant language needs, emotionally disturbed children, internal inadequacy, lack of leadership, personnel, serious public health issues, fundamental issues related to funding, school legal issues related to all of these, even more importantly issues related to teaching methodologies and pedagogy, social inequity and broadly why we are all here. It had a galvanizing effect on him and some 17 years later as he earned his PHD in Educational Leadership from UC Santa Barbara and I sat with my camera I thought of his having his designs removed that long ago day. He met the year admirably attempting to create learning at the level of every child, utilizing his talents and with enthusiasm and hard work. Making meaning, an art form we may be losing today.
Or at least down the hall I saw it that way.
Great story, Sarah. Creativity is not always fancy, but it’s beautiful when it happens in such an original way. I like your observation about the power of art to challenge our beliefs. Some people don’t appreciate that. It rocks the boat.
Thanks for posting. And great story by Sarah. I’m still abysmally ignorant about constructivism, just picking it up as I go, reading snippets here and there. I recently re-visited Paulo Freire’s work and the concept of voice. In a conversation with an education teacher where I work, I began to see how this works. Last Friday I tried modelling successful reading strategies, as described in Mosaic of Thought. It was, I think, successful, but time will tell. The problem I face is students who are basically failures of the school system: they feel discouraged and lack confidence in themselves as learners; they don’t like school, they find studying boring, in fact that they can’t distinguish between learning and “studying”, i.e. schoolwork. They have had years of being implicity told the knowledge and experience they bring to the classroom is not useful or relevant: the textbook, the teacher’s knowledge; that’s what is important. Learn that, copy that, reproduce that. That is what is important, not you, you piddling little nobody. My teacher friend spends the first semester basically doing “show and tell”, something which is not common in Japanese elementary schools, which fact is significant in itself. The purpose is to re-educate them to appreciating the value of what they bring to the classroom. For this reason, he waits an entire semester before introducing the textbook. If he introduced it too soon, the walls and barriers would go up, the patterns of learned helplessness would kick in, the alienation would return instantly. The comments my students wrote after doing the first session of “text-to-self” connections reveal how unusual, not to say odd, they found it to be asked to bring forth their own memories and experiences as relevant to the classroom discourse. Some enjoyed it and got into it quickly. For others, old habits die hard, and they found themselves unable to produce more than a single response sentence. Here is one example. The story I used was an EFL (inauthentic) text of about 200 head-words. Boring as heck, but easy enough (I reckoned) for everyone in the class to understand without problem. After I’d modelled making connections to my own history and experience, students worked in small groups doing the same. One boy sat staring at his desk. The story is about two teenagers who take part in a bicycle race. One, urged on by his dad, and eager to win, pushes the other boy off his bike to win first place. He feels bad, tho, and confesses to his father. Together they visit the kid who’s in hospital with a broken leg. Me: “Did you have a bike like this when you were young?” No. “Did you take part in a race or competition?” No. Did you play any sports to which your parent(s) came to cheer you on?” No. “Did you ever get involved in an accident?” No. “Were you ever hospitalized?” No…. but ….. “Yeessss?” My brother got injured and an ambulance came to take him to hospital. “Like in the story.” Yes. “And did you visit him in hospital, like in the story?” Yes. “There’s a connection. You can write about that.” I’ve edited the exchange for the sake of brevity and readers’ patience. Believe me, it was a lot more hard work than that! I don’t know if this is constructivism or not, but I find the concept of voice, its presence, absence, suppression, to be a rich vein.
Marco, I think that anytime you try to find out what a student understands already, in order to help him learn something new, you are making intuitive use of constructivist theory. A difficulty for students, which you clearly indicate, is that they don’t see the connections between school knowledge and the rest of their lives. And this is, also as you point out, largely cultural. Remember Lisa Delpit’s, Other People’s Children? (A text to world connection, there.)
A kindergarten teacher who I work with expressed it succinctly when she told me that in order for kids to learn anything, “They just need something to hang it on.”
That’s all there is to it. The problem is that we can’t give them the hook.
What a wonderful retelling of coaxing a student to writing. I am copying it to sit on my desk for awhile. Thanks for that.
Why I use this methodology, which I distort at times because I’m rather a benign dictator inside a creation, is several fold. I understand creativity better than any other “approach”. That is who I am and am always cognizant of the need to work out of my strength rather than attempt a bad imitation of another. Holding a master’s in art (as well as teaching degrees) I like doing and making over grading and counting. Pretty much determined to link as much of what we learn into activity and creation as possible logistically, or at least link it into experiential base. I see this as a methodology of doing and making. Construction , tho that approach is certainly more complex than my sunny Sarah dialog here.
And, too, I’ve taught at the edge of America’s societies vision…which is why I found this site with that wonderful title so compelling. I had a friend tell me of my processes, “We are all refugees” and that so informs what I do everyday.. Out on a front line and thinking of myself as tending those left behind, though perhaps I might distort that to those “left to tend themselves”. And though I really hate poverty and ignorance I see that ground as very fertile for creating human character, perspectives, for connection to true meaning of life. If you will allow it, it is from the ground I walk the greatness of the world will spring forth.
But of course, it’s double edged because from those places too lies the capacity for destruction…….. I taught in Appalachia, in my home state, seeing in my early days of teaching the kind of poverty where you lose a few kids to hunger and colds. Or at least in one household up a holler where I tutored, a family in a converted chicken coop, and one chair, they lost the baby and two year old to bronchitis and malnutrition. My rose colored glasses always saw that education and opportunity, public schools and my “mission” were of vital importance to building a nation that lived up to the ideals of our forefathers.
It always rode there as the vehicle to drive the families into better lives for me….Had a Dad that rose through horrible poverty (but a wealth of culture and family indescribably rich) into being a college teacher with PHD’s. So I lived a life aware of learning….and a life aware of poverty… I then went to South Central LA, ironically, to a several block area with the highest murder rate in that fair city where EVERY boy in my class in 1983 is now dead. Then I taught in a migrant farm town 8 years, and now in a part of a city with generational gang life , poverty and issues of immigration. SO as you stated as eloquently as I’ve ever read…..how does one reach a child turned off? I definitely see that….everyday. That rather struck me on arrival in California. I was always teaching where children were so convinced of their lack of worth, it was difficult to believe for me for years.
One solution I reached for intuitively was reading and finding out about motivational theory. I was fascinated by Abraham Maslow and I read all I could get he wrote. Especially in his last writing where he talked about his vision of what kind of learner this coming century might need and described it as “an artist” able to create and respond to a world of information that changed before one could write it down…. This was 1980, so I feel like before I realized what the internet would mean, before reading Teilhard de Chardin, and understanding that noesphere might be a net-o-sphere, through reading what Buckminster Fuller envisioned, and as I read Reuven Fuerstein on mediating learning, and how it was used to kind of push learners into connection via dialog, conversational interaction with specific learning intents from the mediator, reading Carl Rogers of course…, then reading Elliot Eisner, I began to try to pull together “my head” as I, too, worked with children that were such “hard acre” children. It was a matter of figure this out or fail them again. And I saw myself as the one factor I could control.
I could not do anything other than reconstruct different things we did and see what happened within different approaches. Of course I’d read Chomsky since I was very young and for whatever reason grew up thinking about learners and learning. My father is the best user of Socratic methodology in the classroom I ever saw, and frankly though, seldom saw him teach-when I saw him teach – realized he was a teacher who unlocked student conversation and connection and lead students to his meanings and his content directed through their life stories and meanings…..he was an econ. teacher. That kind of gave me something unique within which to frame my perspectives.
I hear that in what you write here today…..about your classroom writing process. . I also, through time, started to teach younger children which is often seen as my love of the babies, but truly is my desire to get ahold of their education prior to too many years of being alienated from doing a good job and finding a way into learning. Then somewhere in there had three kids and unfolded learning and gained confidences with them, plus I married someone with a constructivist soul….so, that said, a few years ago we moved to San Diego to work on a Reservation School and the kids I got from 3rd to 7th grade (very small school) thought getting teachers fired (their whole school did this for sport) was a great way to go and I spent a year with art and writing trying to reconnect as Doug says, the dots, for them from unproductive negativity into self-driven love of life really.
In the end a truly interesting person is a risk taker for their own ideas and able to reveal their weaknesses and to enjoy the process of learning. It was a very tough beginning in which daily had to do my best and take a deep breath as well as have a long term teacher there regularly question every move I made. What I did was not dump content, because it is only when I’m in content that I find happiness. I simply moved the writing process and personal experience to the fore as you are so obviously recounting. And with that comes emotional power, pain and needs to then go into discovery of self.
We talked of values and life. I began a model economy that was dynamic- something that can, if done well, teach the stock market, banking, welfare and public service, courts and life-if done well….anyway that class responded to the arts-drama, plays, we even did 8 feet murals on the fences of the highest peak in the county. While being watched by forces that felt I should be in a workbook and this was nonsense. We recreated theorems, we redesigned bridges. In short we constructed meanings because those children as much, if not more, than any I ever met were active learners. Most worked long farm hours.
It’s rather hard to take a kid that can drive a tractor at 10 years old better than I can, and sit them all day perched in a workbook. What I saw in school in other rooms were elaborate behavioral control models. Lots of punishment scenarios. I was after children writing about what we were learning and doing something. We studied geology, got in Native speakers about mythology around the land and rock at Warner, had a geologist, got in a fantastic specimen to sit on, to “tell tales”, …it was a place everyone came into and the door was open. It was community and child centered. We wrote Rock-u haiku and we did a zillion things including weigh, measure and calculate things that our geologist taught us…..children altered how we went in the day at times, and I altered what we did as we did it. So I’d say we kind of rolled over the issues I saw as I started off, truly nasty hatefilled resistance to being, kids that were almost impossible to reach.
And what about the politics of that method????. The Board of Ed in a school of 350 had my husband the Superintendent “pink slip” me. Then I left. Then my husband left. Then about a third of their children left. Though we didn’t want any of that, and encouraged none of that. The parents saw us as “the real thing” and they didn’t want that to go down that way. Other truly fine teachers there left, too. I think this was for them the watershed moment. And so it goes.
I always tell teachers using methods to really connect to children and lives they will need by definition to be the very best they can be, focused on learning, well-read, prepared, the hardest worker anyone ever saw, completely around appropriate personal behaviors and completely involved….because this methodology isn’t what kids today learn it should “look like” and it’s easy to find your school looking at you with jealousy, distaste, a firm decision they aren’t going there.
It looks a little different. You interrelate so much within this process and you relinquish power, too. It’s a harvest through time. It is a seed, it blossoms, grows, ripens. Often the time of harvest is in the life of a person 15 years or more after leaving you. If you teach for that kind of legs, if you are focused on helping a child find their truer self, to risk peer structures, to hold onto their childhood love of discovery and to push into their life, believing in the love of learning…I see this approach as fundamental for heart building.
Also as it creates community within your space, as you so beautifully described as you listen to someone who is unused to being heard, as you begin to move away from a pathology model in education (you don’t know this we will test then fix you) and move into a model where we figure out your strengths and capacities and learn to work out of them- a subtle shift occurs in a learner. A kind of hope arrives. It is for that “hope” I teach within this methodological frame.
I wish, frankly, I could sit in your classroom and watch you tackle these things you are describing. It sounds so wonderfully interesting. And you sound exactly like who I would want as my teacher…..in the long run you care about the person finding value and self motivation and have intrinsic understanding of their value to this world. Nothing is more important than the teacher role to celebrate that and figure out how to get children in a place to see they must work their lives creating good meanings.
Opps, I told Doug I’d stop writing…it’s just so compelling to me to read such rich things….
Sarah, (You may have said you’d stop writing, but I didn’t ask you to.) meet Marco. Both of you have enriched me. The comments here are invaluable. Thank you.
Constructive learning is learning about something you had no intention of learning about because of what you did or are doing to produce something. You learn that you can have persistence, you can stick with something to completion – you just spent more time on task than you ever did in your life. You learn from failure what doesn’t work and why it doesn’t work until you work out what can work.
Constructive learning is contemplation.
Constructive learning is working things out with someone you could not possibly work things out with because you can’t possibly get along with that person because they are an enemy, your enemy … but, because you had a common goal, an intriguing goal that happened to use your strengths in an unexpected way – you now share a successful experience.
Constructive learning is working on something intriguing enough and important enough (to you) that you stick with it and work through what is hard with materials and people and ideas for long enough to find success.
Constructive learning is making connections.
Constructive learning is learning about just what you had in mind to learn about. You developed the thinking about how to learn what you wanted to learn about. You put together the materials required – Tried it, proved it to yourself. Done. Next.
Constructive learning is just doing something, anything almost, that seems to have even a whiff of possibility … sometimes it just works.
Constructive learning is seeking out those you would really like to work with because you have a good sense that you are kin in your thinking and interest – if the right problem is taken on, kismet can happen – but so can disappointment.
Constructive learning is re-doing it because now we see how it could be really great.
Constructive learning is starting to make one thing, but then realizing it would make a better other thing. So you make the other thing instead.
Constructive learning is everything fell apart. The group, what we were trying to do, the idea, and it’s best to just walk away.
Constructive learning is everything fell apart. The group, what we were trying to do, the idea, but now we’ve had time and we are enthusiastic about it again.
Constructive learning is finding out that someone you thought was cool, was someone to be around … isn’t.
Constructive learning is learning that that jerk, that idiot, that ugly person … isn’t.
Constructive learning is planning a constructive learning experience and watching what you hoped would happen, happen – but also all the great stuff you didn’t really plan to happen, that happens.
Constructive learning is the kids that never got it until they had a chance to do it this way.
Constructive learning is more than the above – it is a passion.
I was a bit surprised at feeling the need (today) to defend constructivism against articles and comments I came across recently.
minimal guidance during instruction can work
the network is not god
Hence it was pleasant to come here and read some grass roots stories from a more positive perspective.
Bill,
great links, thanks!
It’s important, of course, to distinguish between a theory of learning, of how people learn, on the one hand, and the pedagogy or how to actually implement it. Constructivism is a theory of learning, not a teaching method or approach. The nuts and bolts still need to be worked out at the chalkface, and that includes issues like how to relate to students, understanding where they are “at”, how learning, school, you, look like from their points of view, understanding power differentials, dominant discourse and resistance.
Doug quotes Brad thusly: I don’t know the extent to which constructivism can work for math education as an isolated strategy.
Quoting myself: Constructivism is a theory of learning, not a teaching method or approach. So I don’t really understand what Brad means by “constructivism as an isolated strategy”. That sounds like using the Socratic method “as an isolated strategy”. Somehow, I don’t think you’d get much result from that.
And now you prompt me to wonder, if a strategy is isololated, from what would it have been removed? From a context, a purpose…don’t know what an isolated strategy is. I don’t see very many things as isolated – too busy connecting stuff.
The question of what constructivism is makes my head spin. What does anyone mean when they use such big words? We have to be careful when we listen to each other so we don’t talk past our intended meanings. I suppose constructivism might be both method and theory, strategy and tactic, philosophy and approach, politics and religion…
depending on what we want to do with it.
After two hours of listening to Dr. Puglisi on construction…..I think I’m going to say …….theory…. I hope you are ready for action because tomorrow I’ve got some 1st graders coming through that door and they surely need something prettier than that workbook and dynamic story The Big Hit.I have much new spirit to call forth, thank you all for these delightful thoughts in my day off with headache and time to read. I need to read even more, as you can see. And there are now lots more places to find this for me. And I’m simply floored at all this site has led me to by way of deeper thought, links, connections. You could take every workshop they’ve had me in for 5 years and not match five sentences here. I thought I used this learning theory in how I worked…My husband now talking of critical pedagogy and Friere….and my mind wandering to thoughts of counting the pumpkin seeds, the pies I baked them, the snake skin I found and our new birds…..what fun learning is, no?
I got this in my email about an hour ago:
I am writing on behalf of the Tasmanian Department of Education to request permission to use information generated on your site and/ or provide a link to your site http://borderland.northernattitude.org/2005/10/01 for inclusion in the following publication: Year 10 Pathway Planning: Pathway Experiences.
I went back to look at the article they want to link to, and…I kind of liked it. I’m mentioning it here because it’s on topic, and was prompted by a course I took related to science inquiry last year.
This subject is ripe for repeated treatments, I guess. In my web ramblings I’ve discovered some other things that have sent new ideas spinning for me, as well.
I really appreciate the ideas and stories on construcivism, especially Doug’s thoughts. Another story and a thought:
STORY
I read somewhere about a teacher who was teaching her class about how we generate heat and about temperature. Instead of the usual (quicker) way of doing some worksheets and trying out reading a thermometer for a few days, she decided to start with a question. She asked the kids how to make the thermometer change. They suggested that it needed to be warmed up and so they wanted to wrap it in their coats, so she said that they would try it over recess, so they took the thermometer and wrapped it in a coat and recorded before and after. No change. This went on for a week and the students kept suggesting different things-How about a hat? Maybe it is not thick enough-two coats, leaving it overnight, etc… Finally someone had an Aha moment and said that maybe it is not a coat or hat that creates the warmth, maybe our bodies do it and the clothes hold it in. Now this was a piece of knowledge that the class will never forget. This is the description of constructivism that has stuck with me. When you truly experience something it makes much more sense than when you do worksheets or someone tells you something that you memorize.
THOUGHT
As an adult I realize that a lot of why I didn’t continue in Math and Science had to do with not “getting” it. Now I can see the beauty of math and the importance of science. Then my grades were good, but I could only replacate what my teacher said to do (i.e. the steps of long division), I did not really know why I should do any of it.
Janice
Standing ovation from North Carolina to Doug, Mr. Polo, Sarah, Janice, Brian, Bill, and everybody!
Incredible.
I’m not ashamed to quote it – from Sarah:
Doug’s too modest to mention it, but I’m sure he would say that it’s because of you, the readers and members of this network that make it great.
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[...] An interesting discussion at Borderland inspired this – feel free to add your comments: Constructive learning is learning about something you had no intention of learning about because of what you did or are doing to produce something. You learn that you can have persistence, you can stick with something to completion – you just spent more time on task than you ever did in your life. You learn from failure what doesn’t work and why it doesn’t work until you work out what can work. [...]
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