Contructivism in the Classroom

The classrooms teaching about light bulbs in the video took a traditional approach, telling the student how it worked, letting them have an example and testing them on it. They did well on the test- so what’s the problem?
Constructivism is the idea that students actively construct their knowledge from personal experiences with others in the environment. We all search for meaning in the world, we try to understand why certain things happen the way they do. We don’t have to be taught about the world to make our own assumptions and conclusions. This approach acknowledges that students have prior conceptions to a given subject, and that this may interfere with long term learning of material in the classroom. One of the brightest students in the traditional classroom was given a pretest, taught the material, and tested well afterwards. But- a month later she was retested and she went back to her initial thoughts on how a light bulb worked- despite being told outright how they function. This can be seen as proof of the pervasiveness of constructivism.
Taken a step further to application, there comes the idea of individual or cognitive constructivism, which focuses on how individuals construct knowledge in their minds. It implies the following: that teachers release control of student learning, allow student’s interests to drive the process of knowledge construction, and let students make intellectual choices for themselves.
This evolved into the concept of discovery learning, where the students try to find a solution to a problem or an explanation for a phenomenon rather than simply memorizing rules and expectations. A more focused approach than simply letting the students find out for themselves (pure discovery) is guided discovery where students find a solution to a problem or an explanation for a phenomenon with the help of teacher hints and directions. The experimental classroom approach later in the video was a guided discovery format. The teachers gave the students a goal, the materials needed to complete the goal, and let them figure out how to accomplish it. When the students asked in frustration how to solve the problem the teachers did not cave in and explain, they instead redirected their questions to a more helpful direction so that they didn’t get stuck. They also emphasized that the students record everything they did, including their mistakes, so that they could build on that knowledge and figure out what didn’t work. At the end of the lesson the students figured out how to wire the light bulb so that is lit up several different ways, and understood exactly what needed to be done to make it light (wire connected at the bottom and the side). This is much more meaningful processing, and required direct confrontation with any contradictory ideas about light bulbs. This took a lot longer, but the students will probably remember the lessons much longer than they would have in a traditional classroom.
 
Based on what you learned from all the videos, what socio-cognitive and constructivist ideas might you need to consider when planning your own lessons within your own domain of knowledge?
If I were teaching kids (age 10-12) how to use a computer program (a good basic skill), such as Word or PowerPoint, I would tell them certain things I needed them to do, like make slides that have spinning text and formatting with a certain style- and let them figure out how to on their own. They would have to explore the program and try a lot of things that didn’t work, but would eventually find what they needed, and all that exploring and experimenting with features would be much more productive in learning than me telling them exactly how to do what I required them to do.