The Constructivist Pedagogy We're Looking For

Abstract

In the course I teach on Curricula in Higher Education, I my that part of curriculum design is re-design. In teaching a course, we learn how improve it. Especially the first time we teach a course. Joe Marren has taken the notion of improvement very seriously. Preparing teach a course for the second time, he has thought through course assignments, talked with who took the course the first time gather more information about their experiences, and tried figure out how best assess student achievement. In my response Joe's essay, I will focus on his arguments regarding constructivist pedagogy and try answer Joe's questions about the role of the instructor and in this course, useful assignments, and how assess student learning. I'll frame my response from a constructivist standpoint so I can address some common misperceptions about this approach teaching and learning. Many college and university professors believe that constructivism advocates a hands-off approach instruction. Constructivists, they imagine, don't tell anything because need discover answers and solutions problems.1 While Joe agrees that students learn best when they learn actively, he's not confident that his can create a code of ethics without his leading the discussion. He argues that his twenty-plus years of practical experience are a valuable resource for his students, and that dominating the discussion would defeat the pedagogical goal of teaching the teach Since he wants share his experience, he contends, he can't adopt a 'true' constructivist approach. Joe's right. Constructivist teachers are likely raise an eyebrow when confronted with a colleague who dominates a classroom discussion by neglecting provide with opportunities make sense of and test their understandings. That's because all constructivists believe that knowledge is constructed from existing (or prior) knowledge. Constructivist pedagogy therefore emphasizes the active learner-who discusses, questions, debates, hypothesizes, investigates, and argues in order understand new information (see Phillips and Soltis, 2004). This is not merely pedagogical perspective. It is a theory about how people learn that is widely shared, not only by constructivists, but by most educational psychologists and cognitive scientists. Like many faculty, however, Joe misapprehends some things about constructivist pedagogy. For example, he writes that constructivism requires to teach themselves. In my book, that's a misreading of constructivist pedagogy and probably rooted in early constructivist theory. A little history will help me make this point and clarify our understanding of constructivism. Jean Piaget, the twentieth-century Swiss psychologist whose theory of learning and development contributed today's constructivist theories, portrayed the learner as an individual encountering the world around her and making sense of it largely on her own. Critiques of Piaget's individualistic constructivism, even by his contemporaries in the 1920s and 1930s, rejected this individualistic account, emphasizing the critical role of social interactions and social contexts in shaping the individual's learning (for discussions, see Phillips and Soltis, 2004; Wertsch, 1985). In schools, for example, learning is mediated by teachers who are more skilled and knowledgeable than and who can guide them in the development of new knowledge and skills. Peers can also mediate learning when they share understandings of a task inside or outside the classroom. Learning in our everyday lives is also mediated. Children learn about acceptable values and behaviors by observing adults and peers. Consider, too, how we learn on the job and how we use workplace learning for educational purposes. A journalism internship on a newspaper staff, for instance, is intended introduce the professional practices of the field. …