Constructing understanding

Windschitl, M. A. (2000). Constructing understanding. In Joseph et al. Cultures of curriculum.

Three themes of constructing understanding

• centrality of the learner
  compare new knowledge with their past knowledge; learners as capable agents of knowledge production
  
• complexity
  PBL; richer, more integrated view of the world; teacher incorporate student diversities into classroom
  
• engagement
  experiencing the content; projects; interacting with teachers and peers
  

The characteristics of this curriculum culture

• Encourages learners to utilize their lived experiences, intellectual strengths, and interactions with others to bridge the domains of formal knowledge with the rich, continually evolving world of the individual mind

Visions

• Constructivism: learners actively create and restructure knowledge, constantly comparing ideas introduced in formal instruction to their existing knowledge, which has been assembled from personal experiences, the intellectual, cultural, and social contexts in which these ideas occur, and a host of other influences that serve to mediate understanding
  
• Objectivism (in opposition to Constructivism): an external world independent of human consciousness. Language as a precise, neutral tool to describe the real world and effectively map knowledge from the minds of instructors to the minds of learners. These two beliefs supported transmission models of instruction (direct instruction, didacticism). E.g., behaviorism - knowledge and skills may be decomposed, the components removed from from context, acquired separately by learners through systematic reinforcement of incremental target learning behaviors, and then concatenated by the learner to form a coherent whole
• Sense of agency in learners related to Piaget's larger view of the purpose of education: to develop intellectual and even moral autonomy in learners
• Critical constructivism: questioning the value of individualism, objectivity, rationality and efficiency as well as the resulting forms of pedagogy and curriculum. It suggests that teachers should convey to learners that all knowledge is provisional and make explicit the political and social context of this knowledge.
• encourage learners to expand on the ideas of other - to explore the possibilities not only of how to solve authentic problems, but consider alternative ways of seeing what problems 'exist' in a given situation
• Lager vision: citizens collaborate effectively, understand and appreciate other's viewpoints, incorporate diverse ideas into problem solutions, negotiate with open mind, life-long learners, respect children's way of seeing the world
  

History

• John Dewey's progressive schools: lab school in Chicago, 1896, to 'test, verify, and criticize' educational theory as well as to contribute new ideas to education
  
  • the curriculum should spring from the "genuine" experiences of children
  • authentic problems should be identified within these experiences to serve as stimuli for thought
  • students should be allowed the freedom to gather the info necessary to deal with these problems
  • students should be given opportunities to test these ideas through application to make their meaning clear and test their validity (Dewey, 1916)
    
• Montessori schools (1967)
  
  • teachers as facilitators, architects of the environment, resource persons, supportive
    
  • Children as free pursuer of learning experiences, natural learners in a better position to make learning choices than their adult mentors
• Reggio Emilia schools (1946)
  
  • projects involving teachers, family, and community members
  • objective: to increase the possibilities for the child to invent and discover
  • children as capable of making meaning from daily life experiences through mental acts involving planning, coordination of ideas, and abstraction
    
• Piaget
  
  • learning as a way of constantly reorganizing one's world, reconciling new info with past experience
  • Knowledge is not an internalized representation of the real world but a collection of conceptual structures that are sensible only within the knowing subject's range of experience (foundational to cognitive constructivism)
  • Cognitive constructivism: the system of explanations for how learners, as individuals, impose structure on their worlds (a. meaning is rooted in and indexed by personal experiences; b. young learners possess complex but inaccurate conceptions of how the world works; c. these conceptions influence how they respond to formal instruction
• Two theories related to cognitive constructivism - social constructivism & sociocultural learning: knowledge is personally constructed and socially mediated (e.g., individuals construct knowledge in the presence of others who both constrain and enrich the environment through the use of tools such as language, conventions (such as pre-established concepts), and accepted practices for creating and judging knowledge (Vygotsy, 1979)

Learners and teachers

• Learners: continually involved in reorganizing their world, actively imposing order and meaning on their experiences and "creating" the world in which they live
• Teacher: a learning facilitator and a codeveloper of understanding with the student rather than a dispenser of knowledge
• Instruction styles: probing discussion, interviews, concept mapping, presentations, demonstrations, semi-structured activities
• Strategies
  
  • Scaffolding, in which teachers reduce the difficulty of learning tasks by helping students with more complex aspects of problems and gradually give more responsibility to learners as time passes
    
  • Modeling, in which teachers either think loud or act out how they would approach a problem
    
  • Providing hints to learners by asking probing questions or redirecting attention
    

Content and context

• Norms about content
  
  • The way in which learners approach the subject matter is as important as the topics themselves
  • The long, critical engagements with the subject matter favored in the constructivist culture suggest that less is more (understanding is fostered by prolonged engagements with a few key topics and encyclopedic coverage of content is avoided)
  • The organization of content lends itself to the integrated curriculum (e.g., studying the historical perspectives of art, the mathematics of geography, literature in science)
    
• Concerning the context of instruction, the focus is the learner rather than the subject matter
  
  • Situating examples, analogies within meaningful contexts
  • Not to provide exhaustive detail, "authoritative" explanations
  • Working in groups
  • Collecting evidence and generating interpretations consistent with such evidence (foster a "thinking about thinking" environment)
  • Long-term engagement with projects and problems (block scheduling, interdisciplinary curriculum, teacher teaming)
    
• Common characteristics in the design
  
  • Teachers find out "where students are" intellectually before instruction and then monitor how students gradually make sense of the subject matter
  • Teachers provide students with early investigative experiences relevant to the subject matter rather than start with explanations
  • Students are given frequent opportunities to engage in problem or inquiry-based activities
  • Such problems are meaningful to the student and not oversimplified or decontextualized
  • Students work collaboratively and are encouraged to engage in dialogue
  • Students have various avenues to express what they know to their peers and to the teacher
  • Teachers encourage students' reflective and autonomous thinking in conjunction with the conditions listed above
    

Planning and evaluation

• Teachers shape the curricular process, determine standards for the students' work, and create the structure of classroom activity
• Students have some latitude in choosing problems or designing projects that relate to curricular themes; negotiating with the teacher what the criteria are for selecting problems to study, and what kinds of evidence must be provided to demonstrate their learning
• Planning criteria
  
  • Is the chosen problem meaningful, important to the discipline and complex enough?
  • Does it deal with the theme of the unit under study?
  • Does it require original thinking and interpretation or is it simply fact-finding?
  • Can this problem help you think about related problems?
  • Will engaging with this problem result in the acquisition of contexualized facts, concepts, and principles that are fundamental to the theme under study?
    
• Evaluation (rigorous and multidimensional)
  
  • Based on the processes as well as the products of intellectual activity
  • Not absolutely preclude objective testing as one source of evidence of understanding (the exclusive use of objective testing provides only a limited pic of the scope of learner's knowledge)
  • Based primarily on student performances or artifacts generated as a result of substantial effort, judged against the agreed-upon criteria that the students jointly developed with the teacher
  • Students maintain portfolios that contain both typical and exemplary works
    

Dilemmas of practice

• The most difficult challenge in maintaining a culture of constructivism: the need for many teachers to reconceptualize their view of instruction
• The oversimplification of constructivism as opposed to traditional instruction
  
  • Reduced the instruction to "anything goes"
  • Effective forms should integrate both teacher-centered and student-centered models that have systematic and purposeful structure, and value rigorous evaluations of learning progress
    
• Heavy burden on teachers' side
  
  • teachers are responsible for the framework of instruction
  • requires teachers to have an almost unrealistic degree of subject matter knowledge and pedagogical skill including negotiating subject matter and evaluation criteria with students, maintaining a pro-social atmosphere in student groups, and coordinating the timetables of the various student projects; understand what a "problem" is, and cooperative learning theory
    
• Lack of control over students
• What exactly do we want students to construct?
• Ideas in the academic disciplines will differ in the extent to which they can be taught through constructivist instruction (e.g., math 3x2=6 both sense-making experiences and rote learning)
  

Critique

• Although constructivism can be viewed as a philosophy that provides guidelines for learning such as promoting student autonomy, collaboration, and sense making, it remains difficult to represent constructivism as a single, coherent set of pedagogical methods (it is little more than thematic, project-based learning)
• The goals of education, articulated in national, state and local standards, do not always seem compatible with the rich and diverse understandings of individual students
• Constructivism represents merely a set of guidelines for instruction and does not have import with regard to the larger issues of curriculum
  
  • no social vision is promoted
  • no concern for caring about others or for the environment, for combating oppression, or for making the world a better place
  • no incentives for learners to participate in the community or in the larger culture outside of school
  • pays little attention to how politics and privilege affect meaning-making by learners
  • The constructivist culture may be a means, but not an end (This culture aims to promote autonomous learners and create a society in which authority is never blindly followed and individuals' worldviews are not controlled by miseducative influences of peers and popular culture. Autonomy, however, does not automatically translate into community or a shared vision of a better society)
    

Critique