Constructivist Learning

Constructivist learning is method of showing children the world that has intrigued me since before I knew there was a name for it, and I am quite excited to find that it is something that is actually studied and practiced, and not simply the crazy idea my parents had that happened to meet our family's educational wants and needs. That aside, the video "How Can We Believe Our Eyes" does an excellent job of illustrating some aspects of constructivist learning. These include:

Discovery Learning: Students in the classes utilizing constructivist learning were given lightbulbs, wires, batteries, and various other supples, and were then essentially told to figure out how the lightbulb works, instead of simply reading about electricity in the textbook and then being told how to build a completed circuit step by step.

Guided Discovery: The teacher in each of these classes acted as more of a learning coach, a term often used in Unschooling communities, instead of a step-by-step instructor. Students' with questions were guided towards the answers as was necessary, but never simply told what to do next. The teachers very deliberately let the students find their own way, and this would allow for a much more thorough understanding of both what works and why it works.

Inquiry-based Learning: The teachers in these classes asked the students open-ended questions, and encouraged them to think not just about what is working, but why it seems to work while other techniques do not.

Social Constructivism: Class discussion was an important part of the constructivist learning used in these classes. Students shared their ideas about why certain attempts to light the bulb were successful, and built on the discoveries of their peers as needed.

Cooperative Learning: Students worked on the lightbulb activity in small groups, facilitating thinking aloud as students reasoned through problems in a friendly environment where they can learn from their mistakes, as well as from their peers.

I've always believed that learning by doing, by figuring out the solution to the puzzle, as it were, yeilds the most powerful results, for me at least. After viewing these videos and coming to understand the concept of constructivist learning from an academic perspective had lead me to consider my postsecondary teaching, as well as the task of homeschooling my future children, in new ways. When teaching my children, I'll need to be careful how I explain new concepts, and ever aware of what my children are taking away from the lesson. Did they soak up irrelevent details, or do they understand the underlying concept as a gestalt? Do they see the trees, or the forest? In the Psychology classroom, I will need to make sure that my lectures focus not on Psychology as a series of set-in-stone rules for the mind, but rather on Psychology as a series of questions whose answers are constantly being built upon by new discovery. I should not, for example, simply tell my students how classical conditioning works, but let them reason their own way through why Baby Albert is terrified of little white mice and what this has to do with learned behaviors.