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).