Constructivism

1. Constructivism

2. Last Week: Cognitivism

3. Cognitive Constructivism

4. Cognitive Constructivism • Learning is an active process: Direct experience, making errors, and looking for solutions are vital for the assimilation and accommodation of information. How information is presented is important. When information is introduced as an aid to problem solving, it functions as a tool rather than an isolated arbitrary fact. • Learning should be whole, authentic, and "real": Piaget helps us to understand that meaning is constructed as children interact in meaningful ways with the world around them. Thus, That means less emphasis on isolated "skill" exercises that try to teach something like long division or end of sentence punctuation. Students still learn these things in cognitive constructivist classrooms, but they are more likely to learn them if they are engaged in meaningful activities (such as operating a class "store" or "bank" or writing and editing a class newspaper).

5. Jerome Seymour Bruner • Born October 1, 1915 • Age 94 • Born in New York, New York • cognitive psychologist and educational psychologist • Scaffolding Theory • Spiral Curriculum

6. Theory of Instruction • Learning is an active process in which learners constructs new ideas or concepts based upon their current/past knowledge. • The learner selects and transforms information, constructs hypotheses, and makes decisions, relying on a cognitive structure to do so. • Cognitive structure (i.e., schema, mental models) provides meaning and organization to experiences and allows the individual to "go beyond the information given".

7. Theory of Instruction • As far as instruction is concerned, the instructor should try and encourage students to discover principles by themselves. • The instructor and student should engage in an active dialog (i.e., Socratic learning). • The task of the instructor is to translate information to be learned into a format appropriate to the learner's current state of understanding. • Curriculum should be organized in a spiral manner so that the student continually builds upon what they have already learned.

8. He used the term to describe young children's oral language acquisition. Helped by their parents when they first start learning to speak, young children are provided with instinctive structures to learn a language. Bed-time stories and read alouds are classic examples Scaffolding Theory

9. Instead of focusing for relatively long periods of time on specific narrow topics, a spiral curriculum tries to expose students to a wide varies of ideas over and over ago. Spiral Curriculum

10. Jean Piaget • Born 9 August 1896 • Died 16 Sept 1980 • Born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland • Swiss psychologist and philosopher • He laid great importance to the education of children

11. Key Ideas • Schemas – categories of knowledge • A schema describes both the mental and physical actions involved in understanding and knowing. Schemas are categories of knowledge that help us to interpret and understand the world. In Piaget's view, a schema includes both a category of knowledge and the process of obtaining that knowledge. As experiences happen, this new information is used to modify, add to, or change previously existing schemas. For example, a child may have a schema about a type of animal, such as a dog. If the child's sole experience has been with small dogs, a child might believe that all dogs are small, furry, and have four legs. Suppose then that the child encounters a very large dog. The child will take in this new information, modifying the previously existing schema to include this new information.

12. Key Ideas • Assimilation - adding to an existing schema • The process of taking in new information into our previously existing schema’s is known as assimilation. The process is somewhat subjective, because we tend to modify experience or information somewhat to fit in with our pre-existing beliefs. In the example above, seeing a dog and labeling it "dog" is an example of assimilating the animal into the child's dog schema.

13. Key Ideas • Accommodation - changing an existing schema • Another part of adaptation involves changing or altering our existing schemas in light of new information, a process known as accommodation. Accommodation involves altering existing schemas, or ideas, as a result of new information or new experiences. New schemas may also be developed during this process.

14. Key Ideas • Equilibration - balancing between assimilation and accommodation • Piaget believed that all children try to strike a balance between assimilation and accommodation, which is achieved through a mechanism Piaget called equilibration. As children progress through the stages of cognitive development, it is important to maintain a balance between applying previous knowledge (assimilation) and changing behaviour to account for new knowledge (accommodation). Equilibration helps explain how children are able to move from one stage of thought into the next.

15. The four development stages • Sensorimotor stage: from birth to age 2. Children experience the world through movement and senses (use five senses to explore the world). During the sensorimotor stage children are extremely egocentric, meaning they cannot perceive the world from others' viewpoints. • Preoperational Stage: from ages 2 to 7 (magical thinking predominates. Acquisition of motor skills). Egocentrism begins strongly and then weakens. Children cannot conserve or use logical thinking. • Concrete operational Stage: from ages 7 to 12 (children begin to think logically but are very concrete in their thinking). Children can now conceive and think logically but only with practical aids. They are no longer egocentric. • Formal operational Stage: from age 12 onwards (development of abstract reasoning). Children develop abstract thought and can easily conserve and think logically in their mind.

16. Other forms of Constructivism

17. Constructivism

18. Constructivism • humans generate knowledge and meaning from their experiences. • Social Constructivism encourages the learner to arrive at his or her version of the truth, influenced by his or her background, culture or embedded worldview. • Historical developments and symbol systems, such as language, logic, and mathematical systems, are inherited by the learner as a member of a particular culture and these are learned throughout the learner's life. • This also stresses the importance of the nature of the learner's social interaction with knowledgeable members of the society.

19. Lev Vygotsky • Born Nov 17 1896 • Died June 11, 1934 • Bron in Orsha, in the Russian Empire (today in Belarus). • a Soviet psychologist and the founder of cultural-historical psychology.

20. Cultural Mediation and Internalization • Vygotsky investigated child development and how this was guided by the role of culture and interpersonal communication. • He observed how higher mental functions developed historically within particular cultural groups, as well as individually through social interactions with significant people in a child's life, particularly parents, but also other adults. • Through these interactions, a child came to learn the habits of mind of her/his culture, including speech patterns, written language, and other symbolic knowledge through which the child derives meaning and which affected a child's construction of her/his knowledge. • This key premise of Vygotskian psychology is often referred to as cultural mediation.

21. Psychology of Play • Vygotsky's also undertook a great deal of research on play, or children's games, as a psychological phenomenon and its role in the child's development. Through play the child develops abstract meaning separate from the objects in the world, which is a critical feature in the development of higher mental functions.

22. Zone of Proximal Development • Vygotsky’s term for the range of tasks that are too difficult for the child to master alone but that can be learned with guidance and assistance of adults or more-skilled children. • The lower limit of ZPD is the level of skill reached by the child working independently. • The upper limit is the level of additional responsibility the child can accept with the assistance of an able instructor. • Scaffolding is changing the level of support. Over the course of a teaching session, a more-skilled person adjusts the amount of guidance to fit the child’s current performance

23. John Dewey • Born Oct 20, 1859 • Died June 1, 1952 • Born in Burlington, Vermont • Philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer • Very influential to education and social reform

24. The Reflex Arc Concept • In Dewey's article "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology" which appeared in Psychological Review in 1896, he reasons against the traditional stimulus-response understanding of the reflex arc in favor of a "circular" account in which what serves as "stimulus" and what as "response" depends on how one considers the situation. • While he does not deny the existence of stimulus, sensation, and response, he disagreed that they were separate, juxtaposed events happening like links in a chain. • He developed the idea that there is a coordination by which the stimulation is enriched by the results of previous experiences.

25. Reflective Thinking • Reflection as a meaning-making process; • Moves the learner from one experience to the next with deeper understanding of its relationships with and connections to other experiences and ideas. • The thread that makes continuity of learning possible. • It insures the progress of the individual, and, ultimately, society. • It is a means to essentially moral ends.

26. Experiential Learning Model

27. On Education • Dewey was an educational reformer, who emphasized that the traditional teaching's concern with delivering knowledge needed to be balanced with a much greater concern with the students' actual experiences and active learning. • At the same time, Dewey was alarmed by many of the "child-centered" excesses of educational-school pedagogues who claimed to be his followers. In How We Think, Dewey wrote; • “The older type of instruction tended to treat the teacher as a dictatorial ruler. The newer type sometimes treats the teacher as a negligible factor, almost as an evil, though a necessary one. In reality, the teacher is the intellectual leader of a social group, He is a leader, not in virtue of official position, but because of wider and deeper knowledge and matured experience. The supposition that the teacher must abdicate its leadership is merely silly.”

28. Maria Montessori • Born August 31, 1870 • Died May 6, 1952 • Born in Chiaravalle (Ancona), Italy • Physician, educator, philosopher, humanitarian and devout Catholic • best known for her philosophy and the Montessori method of education of children from birth to adolescence

29. Montessori Method • an educational approach where children are given freedom in an environment prepared with materials designed for their self-directed learning activity. • The purpose of which is to bring about, sustain and support children’s true natural way of being ("the child's true normal nature").

30. The Three-Period Lesson • Period 1 consists of providing the child with the name of the material. In the case of letter sounds, the teacher will have the child trace the letter and say, "This is u. This is p." This provides the children with the name of what they are learning. • Period 2 is to help the child recognize the different objects. Most of the time with the three-period lesson is in period 2. Some things the teacher might say are, "Show me the u. Show me the p” or "Point to the u. Point to the p.” After spending some time in the second period, the child may move on to period 3. • Period 3 involves checking to see if the child not only recognizes the name of the material, but is able to tell you what it is. The teacher will point to the "u" and ask the student, "What is this?" If the child replies with, "uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu", the child fully understands it. With letters, the lesson finally ends with the child blending the letters to make a simple word, such as “up.”

31. Planes of Development • The natural development of children proceeds through several distinct planes of development, each one having its own unique conditions and sensitive periods for acquiring basic faculties in the developmental process. • The first plane (ages 0-6) involves basic personality formation and learning through physical senses. During this plane, children experience sensitive periods for acquiring language and developing basic mental order. • The second plane of development (6-12) involves learning through abstract reasoning, developing through a sensitivity for imagination and social interaction with others. • The third plane (12-18) is the period of adolescent growth, involving the significant biological changes of puberty, moving towards learning a valuation of the human personality, especially as related to experiences in the surrounding community. • The fourth plane (18+), involves a completion of all remaining development in the process of maturing in adult society.

32. In America • After the 1907 establishment of Montessori's first school in Rome, by 1917 there was an intense interest in her method in America in large part due to the publication of a small booklet entitled "The Montessori System Examined" by William Heard Kilpatrick - a follower of John Dewey. • Confusion and conflict about the method's philosophy emerged with particular intensity in the modern development of Montessori in the United States where, in 1967, the name "Montessori" was held to be a "generic term" that no organization could claim for its own exclusive use. Since then, the number and diversity of Montessori organizations and philosophies have expanded considerably.