Research into the theory of Constructivism, looking at a range of authors and texts getting a broad idea of different approaches to it and different ways in which it is explained.

Miller L. (2011) Theories and Approaches to Learning in the Early Years, New York: Sage Publications Ltd

Geeson R. et al. (2017) Building Skills for Effective Primary Teaching, New York: Learning Matters

Fosnot C. (1996) Constructivism: Theory, Perspectives and Practice: Second Edition, New York: Teachers College Press

Grennan J. (1993) In Search of Understanding: The Case for Constructivist Classrooms, London: Pearson

Constructivism as a paradigm or worldview posits that learning is an active, constructive process. The learner is an information constructor. People actively construct or create their own subjective representations of objective reality. New information is linked to to prior knowledge, thus mental representations are subjective.

Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky

Jean Piaget

John Dewey

Jerome Seymour Bruner

Learning is an active, contextualised process of constructing knowledge rather than acquiring it.

Knowledge is constructed based on personal experiences and hypotheses of the environment.

Vygotsky - Social Development Theory

Constructivism: Theory, Perspectives, and Practice, Second Edition

By Catherine Twomey Fosno

Self-regulatory process

Struggling with conflict between existing personal models of the world and discrepant new insights.

Constructing new representations and models of reality as a human meaning-making venture, with culturally developed tools and symbols.

Cooperative social activity.

Gives learners the opportunity for concrete, contextually meaningful experience through which they can search for patterns, raise questions, and model, interpret and defend their strategies and ideas.

The classroom is seen as a mini society, a community of learners engaged with activity, discourse, interpretation, justification and reflection.

Teachers assume more of a facilitators role and learners take on more ownership of the ideas.

Autonomy, mutual reciprocity of social relations and empowerment becomes the goal.

We run the risk of short lived reform or fuzzy based practice unless educators understand the theory.

What we call knowledge does not and cannot have the purpose of producing representations of an independent reality, but instead has an adaptive function.

Entails an irrevocable break with the generally accepted epistemological tradition of Western civilisation., according to which the knower must strive to attain a picture of the real world.

if true knowledge is to represent the real world, it could not be attained.

Adaptation instead of representation.

Concept of adaptation stems from biology. They have managed to evolve a fit or their physical characteristics and their ways of behaving have so far proven viable in their environment.

Whatever knowledge was, it was not a copy of reality.

The cognitive subject’s conceptual structures and that structures experiential world.

Knowledge could then be treated as a mapping of actions and conceptual operations that had proven viable in the knowing subject’s experience.

Evolutionary epistemology.

In piagets view what we see, hear and feel is the result of our own perceptual activities and therefore specific to our ways of perceiving and conceiving.

Knowledge arises from actions and the agent’s reflection on them.

A cognitive subject that is dealing with previously constructed perceptual and conceptual structures.

Environment has two distinct meanings,.

environment refers to the totality of permanent objects and their relations that we have abstracted from the flow of our experience.
- Whenever we focus on a particular item, environment refers to the surroundings of the item we have isolated.

When we intend to stimulate and enhance a student’s learning we cannot afford to forget that knowledge does not exist outside of a person’s mind.

Paul Cobb - ‘Taken as shared’

The mutual compatibility in our use of words and language is the result of social interaction.

idiosyncratic - relating to individual

an analysis of meaning always leads to individual experience.

Students perceive their environment in ways that may be different from those intended by educators. ]]And this environment includes curricula, textbooks, didactic props, computer programs and micro worlds, tasks they are given and of course the teachers.

Which emphasises the teacher’s need to construct a hypothetical model of the particular conceptual worlds of the students they are facing.

One can only induce changes in their ways of thinking only if one has some inkling as to the domains of experience, the concepts and conceptual relations the students possess at that moment.

1991 Glasersfeld and Steffe

Learning is a constructive activity that the students themselves have to carry out.

The task of the educator is not to dispense knowledge but to provide students with opportunities and incentives to build it up.

Psycology is the way learning is defined, studied and understood and therefore underlies much of the curricular and instructional decision making that occurs in education.

Constructivism, perhaps the most current in the psychology of learning is no exception.

Major impact on goals teacher’s set for lessons, instructional strategies, methods of assessment.

Initially based on war by Piaget and Vygotsky, then supported and extended by contemporary biologists and cognitive scientists as they studied complexity and emergence.

Knowledge as construction

Behaviorism explains learning as a system of behavioural responses to a physical stimuli. Reinforcement, motivation and learned behaviours.

Maturationism

Conceptual knowledge as dependent on the developmental stage of the learner, natural unfolding of biological programming.

Cognitive development and deep understanding are the focus.

Nonlinear learning.

The child appears to internalise the adult role and eventually directs themselves using the same cues.

Constructivism is a poststructuralist psychological theory, one that construes learning as an interpretive, recursive, nonlinear building process by active learners interacting with their surroundings.

Describes, how structures, language, activity and meaning-making rather than one that simply characterises the structures and stages of thought.

It is a theory based on complexity models of evolution and development.

In Search of Understanding: The Case for Constructivist Classrooms

Book by Jacqueline Grennon Brooks and Martin G. Brooks

In a constructivist classroom, the teacher searches for students' understandings of concepts, and then structures opportunities for students to refine or revise these understandings by posing contradictions, presenting new information, asking questions, encouraging research, and/or engaging students in inquiries designed to challenge current concepts.

Teachers seek and value their students' points of view. Teachers who consistently present the same material to all students simultaneously may not consider students' individual perspectives on the material to be important, may even view them as interfering with the pace and direction of the lesson. In constructivist classrooms, however, students' perspectives are teachers' cues for ensuing lessons.

• Classroom activities challenge students' suppositions. All students, irrespective of age, enter their classrooms with life experiences that have led them to presume certain truths about how

their worlds work. Meaningful classroom experiences either support or contravene students'

suppositions by either validating or transforming these truths.

• Teachers pose problems of emerging relevance. Relevance, meaning, and interest are not

automatically embedded within subject areas or topics. Relevance emerges from the learner.

Constructivist teachers, acknowledging the central role of the learner, structure classroom

experiences that foster the creation of personal meaning.

• Teachers build lessons around primary concepts and ''big" ideas. Too much curriculum is

presented in small, disconnected parts and never woven into whole cloth by the learner. Students memorize the material needed to pass tests. But many students, even those with passing scores, are unable to apply the small parts in other contexts or demonstrate understandings of how the parts relate to their wholes.

Constructivist teachers often offer academic problems that challenge students to grapple first with the big ideas and to discern for themselves, with mediation from the teacher, the parts that require more investigation.

• Teachers assess student learning in the context of daily teaching. Constructivist teachers

don't view assessment of student learning as separate and distinct from the classroom's normal activities but, rather, embed assessment directly into these recurrent

activities.

Some think it is easier it is easier to disseminate information from the front of the room, assign chapters from textbooks, and grade workbook sheets and exams than it is to help each student search for personal understanding and assess the efficacy of that search.

Individuals whose life experiences have shaped singular sets of cognitive needs.

Trying to simplify and quantify the teaching/learning dynamic wrings out its essence and renders it a reductio ad absurdum.

Conceptual understanding mattered more than test scores.

Helping students connect their current ideas with new ones.

We construct our own understandings of the world in which we live.

Our experiences lead us to conclude that some people are generous and other people are cheap of spirit, that representational government either works or doesn't, that fire burns us if we get too close, that rubber balls usually bounce, that most people enjoy compliments, and that cubes have six sides.

Knowledge comes neither from the subject nor the object, but from the unity of the two.

''Learning is not discovering more, but interpreting through a different scheme or structure.” - Fosnot

As human beings, we experience various aspects of the world, such as the beach, at different periods of development, and are thus able to construct more complex understandings. The young child in this example now knows that the taste of seawater is unpleasant. As she grows, she might understand that it tastes salty. As a teenager, she might understand the chemical concept of salinity. At some point in her development, she might examine how salt solutions conduct electricity or how the power of the tides can be harnessed as a source of usable energy.

Don’t connect the information they receive in school to interpretations of the world around them.

Looking at the context of the information they learn.
Maths, what context is it used in real life, money, food etc.

Katz (1985) stresses that emphasis on performance usually results in little recall of concepts over time, while emphasis on learning generates longterm understanding.

Similarly, when the classroom environment in which students spend so much of their day is organised so that student to student interaction is encouraged, cooperation is valued, assignments and materials are interdisciplinary, and students' freedom to chase their own ideas is abundant, students are more likely to take risks and approach assignments with a willingness to accept challenges to their current understandings.

Such teacher role models and environmental conditions honor students as emerging thinkers.

Teachers who value the child's present conceptions, rather than measure how far away they are from other conceptions, help students construct individual understandings important to them.

Case Study

The teacher opened her first lesson with the question: What do you think life science is all about? A few students responded with oneword answers such as "living," "animals," "plants." She acknowledged each student with "Yes" or "That's right." She then read a story about a fire engine. Immediately upon finishing the story, she said to the students: "The point of the story is that you can see many things at a fire and you can see many things in science. Everyone come to the front and get your textbooks." After some administrative work took place, the teacher handed out photocopies of some wellknown optical illusions and said: "In science, you have to develop a critical eye. Write down what you think you see." Her next questions were: "Who can see a vase?" and "Who can see two faces?" The teacher's lesson plan had many of the elements of a constructivist approach, but her implementation of the plan did not. She opened the lesson with an umbrella question that asked students to share their current points of view. But she accepted oneword answers, asked for neither elaboration on the part of the speaker nor feedback from the group. She planned for an analogical discussion with students. But, she, herself, drew the analogy for the students rather than asking questions that would have allowed the students to generate their own analogies. She attempted to integrate her "science" topic with literature and art, encouraging the students to challenge their own perspectives. But she defined the range of perspectives by asking if the students saw a vase or two faces before the students had time to determine for themselves what they were seeing. The new teacher took delight in her generation of the ''Taking a Closer Look" theme and designed a carefully structured plan to share her creativity. But, in doing so, she limited the students' opportunities to tap into their creativity. The lesson was not an invitation to explore the theme. It was a methodical telling of the theme. This example suggests that becoming a constructivist teacher is not simple. It requires continual analysis of both curriculum planning and instructional methodologies during the process of learning to be a teacher, reflective practices for which most teachers have not been prepared.

Deep understanding occurs when the presence of new information prompts the emergence or enhancement of cognitive structures that enable us to rethink our prior ideas.

They free students from the dreariness of factdriven curriculums and allow them to focus on large ideas. • They place in students' hands the exhilarating power to follow trails of interest, to make connections, to reformulate ideas, and to reach unique conclusions. • They share with students the important message that the world is a complex place in which multiple perspectives exist and truth is often a matter of interpretation. • They acknowledge that learning, and the process of assessing learning, are, at best, elusive and messy endeavours that are not easily managed.

epistemology - relating to the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion

There is clearly a connection between constructivism as an epistemological and philosophical image and constructivism as an educational framework.

The view that logical analysis of actions and objects leads to the growth of knowledge and the view that one's individual experiences generate new knowledge.

A constructivist framework challenges teachers to create environments in which they and their students are encouraged to think and explore.

One common criticism of constructivism is that, as a pedagogical framework, it subordinates the curriculum to the interests of the child. Critics contend that the constructivist approach stimulates learning only around concepts in which the students have a prekindled interest.

Constructivist teachers often ask students to think about questions they would not ordinarily consider on their own.

When concepts are presented as wholes, on the other hand, students seek to make meaning by breaking the wholes into parts that they can see and understand. Students initiate this process to make sense of the information; they construct the process and the understanding rather than having it done for them. With curricular activities clustered around broad concepts, students can select their own unique problemsolving approaches and use them as springboards for the construction of new understandings.

We are all responsible for our own learning. The teacher's responsibility is to create educational environments that permit students to assume the responsibility that is rightfully and naturally theirs. Teachers do this by encouraging selfinitiated inquiry, providing the materials and supplies appropriate for the learning tasks, and sensitively mediating teacher/student and student/student interactions. But, the teacher cannot take sole responsibility for the students' learning.

Seeking to understand students' points of view is essential to constructivist education.

The teacher is genuinely interested in knowing more about what they think and why.

But knowledge is not linear, nor is the process of learning. Learning is a journey, not a destination. Each point of view is a temporary intellectual stop along the path of ever increasing knowledge.

the need for teachers to adapt curriculum tasks to address students' suppositions.

Adapting curriculum doesn't necessarily imply editing out certain curricular materials or changing the order of the materials' presentation. Nor does it necessarily imply that material wellmatched to the child's present suppositions will automatically be learned. The process is not so simple. Teacher mediation is a key factor in this complex equation. The teacher can obstruct student learning or help students build their own bridges from present understandings to new, more complex understandings. Although it's the teacher who structures the opportunity, it's the students' own reflective abstractions that create the new understanding.

Constructivist teachers encourage and accept student autonomy and initiative.

Constructivist teachers use raw data and primary sources, along with manipulative, interactive, and physical materials.

When framing tasks, constructivist teachers use cognitive terminology such as "classify," "analyze," "predict," and “create."

Constructivist teachers allow student responses to drive lessons, shift instructional strategies, and alter content.

Constructivist teachers inquire about students' understandings of concepts before sharing their own understandings of those concepts.

Constructivist teachers encourage students to engage in dialogue, both with the teacher and with one another.

Constructivist teachers encourage student inquiry by asking thoughtful, openended questions and encouraging students to ask questions of each other.

Constructivist teachers seek elaboration of students' initial responses.

Constructivist teachers engage students in experiences that might engender contradictions to their initial hypotheses and then encourage discussion.

Constructivist teachers allow wait time after posing questions.

Constructivist teachers provide time for students to construct relationships and create metaphors.

Constructivist teachers nurture students' natural curiosity through frequent use of the learning cycle model.

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED381350.pdf

Identifying and expressing their own problems for investigation. Expressing their own ideas and developing them in solving problems. Testing their ideas and hypotheses against relevant experience. Rationally defending their own ideas and conclusions and submitting the ideas of others to a reasoned criticism.

Human learning presupposes a special social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them.

(1) influence or create motivating conditions for students

(2) take responsibility for creating problem situations ...,

(3) foster acquisition and retrieval of prior knowledge ..., and

(4) create a social environment that emphasizes the attitude of learning to learn ... IT]he learning process not the product of learning is the primary focus of constructivism ...

file:///Users/Holly/Downloads/751_chapter%20(1).pdf

In reality, no one can teach mathematics. Effective teachers are those who can stimulate students to learn mathematics

Knowledge is actively created or invented by the child.

Rather they invent new ways of thinking about the world.

2. Children create new mathematical knowledge by reflecting on their physical and mental actions.

No one true reality exists, only individual interpretations of the world. These interpretations are shaped by experience and social interactions.

Learning is a social process in which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them.

Their beliefs about the nature of mathematics change from viewing mathematics as sense making to viewing it as learning set procedures that make little sense.

First, students should develop mathematical structures that are more complex, abstract, and powerful than the ones they currently possess so that they are increasingly capable of solving a wide variety of meaningful problems.

Second, students should become autonomous and self-motivated in their mathematical activity.

For arithmetic instruction in the first grade, we advocate the use of games and situations in daily living in contrast to the traditional use of textbooks, workbooks, and worksheets.

Piaget’s theory shows that children acquire number concepts by constructing them from the inside rather than by internalizing them from the outside.

Yet children all over the world become able to give correct answers by constructing numerical relationships through their own natural ability to think.

Physical knowledge, on the one hand, is knowledge of objects in external reality. The color and weight of a chip are examples of physical properties that are in objects in external reality and can be known empirically by observation.

Logicomathematical knowledge, on the other hand, consists of relationships created by each individual.

The ultimate sources of social knowledge are conventions worked out by people.

Encourage pupils to invent their own ways of adding and subtracting numbers rather than tell them how. For example, if pupils can play a board game with one die, we simply introduce a second die and let them figure out what to do.

Encourage pupils to exchange points of view rather than reinforce correct answers and correct wrong ones.

Encourage pupils to think rather than to compute with paper and pencil. Written computation interferes with pupils’ freedom to think and to remember sums and differences.

Paper-and-pencil exercises cause social isolation, mechanical repetition, and dependence on the teacher to know if an answer is correct. We, therefore, replace the textbook, workbook, and worksheets with two kinds of activities: games and situations in daily living.

Games, such as a modification of old maid in which pupils try to make a sum of ten with two cards, are well known to be effective.

We use games as a staple of instruction. Games give rise to compelling reasons for pupils to think and to agree or disagree with each other.

Situations in daily living also offer meaningful opportunities for pupils to construct mathematical relationships. Taking attendance, voting, collecting money, and sending notes home are examples of situations the teacher can use to encourage pupils to think.

Pupils care about real-life situations and think much harder about these questions than about those in workbooks.

Resources that are games, fun etc.
Think of an everyday fun game and turn it into a maths game, card and board game.
Resources which aren’t fun and tell children what to do and how to learn.

Holly O'Connor Context of Practice

Tuesday, 30 October 2018

CoP 3 - Images

CoP 3 - Research - Bibliography so Far

CoP 3 - Research - Constructivism

Miller L. (2011) Theories and Approaches to Learning in the Early Years, New York: Sage Publications Ltd