I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I spent the last 10 years teaching music lessons to children and a few adults. I haven’t studied education formally, but have read some of the literature that I thought would be helpful.
My feeling at this point is that constructivism is a useful thing to do, but that it takes a lot of investment on the part of the teacher to pull off at all. It also is slower than the “imitative” approach to education. It is obvious to me that it would overall harm, not help, a person to win a Nobel prize in physics by requiring them to reconstruct all of physics on their own first. But mixing in experiences of figuring out chunks of knowledge for oneself is more satisfying and useful than pure imitation.
Teaching still relies a lot on the teacher’s intuition and personal relationship with the student. It’s not enough to implement constructivism. To use it effectively, you need to implement it well, and on the correct problem area. Insufficient constructivism is not the cause of all learning challenges or experiences of student boredom. Figuring out the right blend is just one of several major problems in the overall challenge of optimizing a student’s education.
So to refine your original post, I recommend shifting more toward questions like:
When is constructivism the right approach for a particular student or subject, and why?
What proportion of constructivism vs. imitative approaches is ideal?
Can we know when constructivism is the key issue for a particular educational problem?
If one student is taught addition via constructivism, and the other by imitation, is there really a fundamental difference in their understanding of addition? Or is the difference in the amount of skill they gain in two different approaches to learning how to learn, rather than in the amount of skill they gain in the object-level topic?
How can we implement constructivist approaches for new topics where it’s not normally applied?
Maybe the constructivist approach works better for subjects with long inferential distances, such as math. Any individual fact is easier to memorize than to understand, in short term. The problem is, with memorization you are building a tower that will collapse under its own weight. Also, a misremembered fact feels exactly the same as a correctly remembered one, so there is no self-check.
I think you can’t use constructivism to learn what is the capital of France.
My first approximation for “when to use constructivist approach” would be like:
if there actually is a gears-level model;
if it is important to remember for more than one week (and writing it down is not an option);
especially if learning new skills depends on getting this one thing right.
If one student is taught addition via constructivism, and the other by imitation, is there really a fundamental difference in their understanding of addition?
It is hard for me to imagine someone not having a gears-level model of addition. But I guess someone who doesn’t, is at risk of making some stupid mistake in future (like, after returning from summer vacation, not having practiced addition for two months; or maybe a few years after finishing school), such as not aligning two numbers correctly, so that 111 + 22 = 331, or maybe with decimals 11.1 + 22 = 133 or 13.3, or something like that. Or would get confused when seeing an unusually written problem, such as 13½ + 24½.
My impression was that with constructivism, the question is not whether the student ultimately achieves a gears-level model, but whether they discover (“construct”) it for themselves.
I agree it’s hard to imagine addition without a gears level model.
Yes, but there can be a lot of nudging towards the discovery.
Like, if you want kids to find out that “a + b = b + a”, you give them hundred pairs of problems like “2 + 7 = ?; 7 + 2 = ?”. That achieves the goal more reliably and more quickly than merely giving them hundred random addition problems.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I spent the last 10 years teaching music lessons to children and a few adults. I haven’t studied education formally, but have read some of the literature that I thought would be helpful.
My feeling at this point is that constructivism is a useful thing to do, but that it takes a lot of investment on the part of the teacher to pull off at all. It also is slower than the “imitative” approach to education. It is obvious to me that it would overall harm, not help, a person to win a Nobel prize in physics by requiring them to reconstruct all of physics on their own first. But mixing in experiences of figuring out chunks of knowledge for oneself is more satisfying and useful than pure imitation.
Teaching still relies a lot on the teacher’s intuition and personal relationship with the student. It’s not enough to implement constructivism. To use it effectively, you need to implement it well, and on the correct problem area. Insufficient constructivism is not the cause of all learning challenges or experiences of student boredom. Figuring out the right blend is just one of several major problems in the overall challenge of optimizing a student’s education.
So to refine your original post, I recommend shifting more toward questions like:
When is constructivism the right approach for a particular student or subject, and why?
What proportion of constructivism vs. imitative approaches is ideal?
Can we know when constructivism is the key issue for a particular educational problem?
If one student is taught addition via constructivism, and the other by imitation, is there really a fundamental difference in their understanding of addition? Or is the difference in the amount of skill they gain in two different approaches to learning how to learn, rather than in the amount of skill they gain in the object-level topic?
How can we implement constructivist approaches for new topics where it’s not normally applied?
Maybe the constructivist approach works better for subjects with long inferential distances, such as math. Any individual fact is easier to memorize than to understand, in short term. The problem is, with memorization you are building a tower that will collapse under its own weight. Also, a misremembered fact feels exactly the same as a correctly remembered one, so there is no self-check.
I think you can’t use constructivism to learn what is the capital of France.
My first approximation for “when to use constructivist approach” would be like:
if there actually is a gears-level model;
if it is important to remember for more than one week (and writing it down is not an option);
especially if learning new skills depends on getting this one thing right.
It is hard for me to imagine someone not having a gears-level model of addition. But I guess someone who doesn’t, is at risk of making some stupid mistake in future (like, after returning from summer vacation, not having practiced addition for two months; or maybe a few years after finishing school), such as not aligning two numbers correctly, so that 111 + 22 = 331, or maybe with decimals 11.1 + 22 = 133 or 13.3, or something like that. Or would get confused when seeing an unusually written problem, such as 13½ + 24½.
My impression was that with constructivism, the question is not whether the student ultimately achieves a gears-level model, but whether they discover (“construct”) it for themselves.
I agree it’s hard to imagine addition without a gears level model.
Yes, but there can be a lot of nudging towards the discovery.
Like, if you want kids to find out that “a + b = b + a”, you give them hundred pairs of problems like “2 + 7 = ?; 7 + 2 = ?”. That achieves the goal more reliably and more quickly than merely giving them hundred random addition problems.