Constructivism

=__Constructivism__= By Bryce Hartranft

"//Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.//" -//Chinese Proverb//

Process
Educators of the future must not serve as crutches to their students, but instead temporary trampolines. By this, I mean that teachers must help students reach new heights while at the same time letting them learn how to achieve success in the future on their own. Constructivism is perfect for this plan because it deemphasizes the role of the teacher in favor of students learning how to teach themselves.

Constructivism states that the way people learn is by building from old experiences. Therefore, in order to use it, instructors must not answer questions, but instead, help students devise quality questions and then how to answer them on their own. Popular methods of achieving this goal include problem-solving activities and inquiry based learning.

Interestingly, there are not too many steps involved in implementing constructivism, but each step has almost an unlimited amount of depth depending on how far the instructor wants to go.
 * 1) Learn new information[[image:http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/constructivism/images/spiral_ill.gif align="right" caption="http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/constructivism/images/spiral_ill.gif"]]
 * 2) Reflect
 * How does new information fit with old?
 * What helped promote learning?
 * 1) Repeat

By far the most involved step is reflection, in fact, constructivism depends on reflection. When a student reflects, he or she is using the basis of constructivism - building from the experiences which Piaget placed so much importance on. This process teaches the student not only the content at hand, but also how to teach themselves later. In essence, the goal of constructivism is not to teach a specific topic or subject, but rather to teach the learner how to learn. Questions focusing on which strategies worked and which did not is a problem solving skill which can be used for the entirety of someone's life.

Below is a video of John Abbott, the director of the 21st Century Learning Initiative, explaining the basics of constructivism.

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History


For much of the 20th century, behaviorist theory dominated educational thought. With success in WW2 and the concurrent growth in industry, it is no wonder why Americans thought that if a person could be trained to fight or build, they could be trained to learn in school too. In reality, however, people of the time had confused training for education. While the operant conditioning of B.F. Skinner, which looked for observable behaviors, was quite effective to learn simple, lower-order tasks, it was not nearly as easy to "shape" a person into being able to compare, contrast, evaluate and assess.



Enter the ideas of Dewey, Vygostky and Piaget. Dewey believed that the only way to make education effective was to ground it in reality. Rather than constant, abstract drills that do not compare to the actual task, have the learner perform actions as similar to what they would do in real-life as possible. For example, training a doctor would consist of surgeries on cadavers or virtual simulators.



Vygotsky created the keyword "Zone of Proximal Development." The term refers to the ability of learners augmented by a tutor to learn skills or concepts that would normally be beyond their ability. The necessity of social interaction between peers or between a student and teacher created another important term - social constructivism - the idea that a person learns more in a social environment rather than an individual one.



Piaget was interested in environments and how they shape learning. He believed that all learning is a result of the experiences a person has. Therefore, if an educator wants his or her students to have an enriching learning experience, he or she needs to shape the experiences they have so as to ensure they are useful. An interesting proposition, in that, educators should give students enough freedom to experience things on their own, but maintain enough control to ensure they are good experiences (Huang, 2002).

The thoughts of Dewey, Vygostky and Piaget were important factors in the creation of the constructivism learning theory (Educational Broadcasting Corporation, 2011).

Skills Required
While constructivism teaches many different skills, in order for it to have the maximum effect, it also helps for students and teachers to have the following abilities when using it.


 * Students || Teachers ||
 * * Rich background
 * Willing to ask questions
 * Ability to find information
 * Ability to assess and evaluate new information || * Asking good questions
 * Facilitation
 * Motivation
 * Informal Assessment ||

Benefits
Constructivism is a popular choice for educators because it allows the students to discover things on their own, which is often more powerful than any other learning method. Below is a list of accolades:
 * Promotes higher order thinking skills
 * Teaches students how to learn
 * Transferable knowledge
 * Students take ownership of their learning
 * Promotes social skills (Educational Broadcasting Corporation, 2011).

Criticisms
Not everyone is enamored with constructivism theory. Below is a list of criticisms:
 * Constructivism takes teachers out of the active process of teaching
 * Why take the one person out of learning who has the greatest impact on learning?
 * Expert knowledge of teacher not put to good use
 * Project and enrichment oriented activities take longer than other forms of delivering information
 * Many argue that this only works for students that are affluent and already have the skills necessary to gain something from enrichment activities
 * Rather than individual students actively participating and learning, they become victims of "Group Think," in which a few students control everything (Educational Broadcasting Corporation, 2011).

Issues with Constructivism in the 2025 Class Room
In order for students to take ownership of their learning, they must play an integral part in choosing what they learn. This promotes increased motivation, but what happens to curricula if students are choosing the topics? An important point to consider when thinking of constructivism is that it is both independent and structured at the same time - much like scaffolding. When an instructor chooses to allow student input on topics, it must be within a framework that will give them a rich educational experience.

Another issue with constructivism is its emphasis of skills over facts, but how much? Does this mean that facts are to be forgotten entirely or do students still need them? Constructivism does require students to have a rich background to build from, so aren't facts necessary for that? How do educators know if they are covering enough facts to support future learning?

Issues like those above show that constructivism, like much of education, is not a black and white idea. There are areas of grey that are dependent on how the teacher and students approach learning.

Next: Situated Learning, another theory on learning