Let’s be clear: the belief that
higher scores on state tests are reflective of enhanced learning is a mirage. It is reflective only of mimicked learning
and thus we are mired in the illusion of reform. Meaningful reform is only achievable if we
make the conscious, committed decision to break away from the profoundly
misguided notion that testing and accountability can drive systemic reform, and
aim our energies instead at processes and practices focused on student
learning. Not at testing. Not at sanction-based accountability
systems. Not at politically driven
federal and state interventions. We
must place student learning at the heart of everything we do … it is our core
mission.
The nucleus of our
work is education - the processes of teaching and learning that occur daily and
are the essence of classroom life. Educational reform must start with how
students learn and the ways in which that knowledge informs how teachers
teach. It is the search for and construction of understanding that sit at the center
of the highly complex process of learning, and it is underpinned by what
appears to be a simple proposition (Grennon Brooks & Brooks, 1999) … that we each construct our own knowledge and
understandings.
The Mission
The conventionally accepted mission of
schooling in today’s world – to attain higher scores on tests – is a perversion
of our real mission, counterproductive to students’ education, and needs to be
rethought with the construction of meaning placed at the core of the new
mission.
It is human nature to seek
meaning. It’s as natural as
breathing: we simply can’t help it. Through daily interaction with our worlds,
and the people, objects and ideas that comprise them, we are constantly seeking
– and constructing – newer, richer, broader and deeper understandings. On our way to work we encounter a traffic
jam, and we seek to know why: is it an
accident or roadwork or just volume … and is this jam happening just today or
is it indicative of a new traffic pattern that needs to be avoided in the upcoming
weeks? We turn on the radio to obtain
meaningful information so we can understand what we are encountering and what
we can do to resolve the situation. We
get into school and are told a meeting has been called by the principal before
the first period. We want to know
why: did something unusual occur? If so,
what? Before the meeting, we speak with
our colleagues to see if they can shed any light so we can understand what is
happening and prepare ourselves for the meeting. We teach our first class of the day and
discover that a particular student is absent.
Why? Is she ill? Cutting?
During the first break, we go the main office to find out so we can
understand whether to mark her legally or illegally absent and perhaps make a
call to her home. We may even speak to
some of her friends to find out why she is absent. We get a phone message during the day from
our spouse. Why? Is anything wrong at home? Did our dinner plans change? Did our child’s lacrosse game get changed? We
wait for our break to make a call so we can understand what if anything is
happening and what we can do about it. And so it goes, endlessly. Life is a constant search for meaning.
It is no different for our students
than it is for us. They are assigned to
read a poem by Donne: why? What is it about this poem that separates it
from the thousands of other poems they might be reading? Why does the teacher think this particular
poem is so special? What is Donne trying
to tell us in this poem, and how does it connect to the other poems we’ve been
reading? When a pebble is thrown into a
body of water, floating objects move in toward the ripples, not away from
them. Why? This phenomenon seems counterintuitive, but
the evidence is irrefutable. How is this
explained? No matter where we stand on
the Earth, we always see the same side of the moon. Why?
Doesn’t the moon rotate? If so,
shouldn’t we be able to see the other side?
Why don’t we?
Students are filled with questions
about what they encounter each day, questions emanating from their quest to
make meaning – about both the social cognition that underpins the lesson (why
did the teacher choose this particular problem, reading, experiment, phenomenon?)
and the content (why do we see only one side of the moon?). If lessons are solely factual and formulaic,
these questions rarely get asked and almost never get answered, and the reality
that these questions even occur to the students is almost never acknowledged by
the teacher. The students are expected
to simply and dutifully go about the business of memorizing the
information. If the lessons are
structured around the construction of knowledge and meaning, however,
exploration and analysis become embedded in the classrooms’ norms and
structures, and the quest to make meaning is acknowledged and honored.
It is important to note that the
quest for meaning occurs within the borders of learners’ personal worlds,
spheres of knowledge and understanding that are internally constructed and are
constantly changing based on new inputs.
There is not one, agreed-upon, fixed world “out there” for teachers to
teach and students to learn. Each
student creates his/her own, unique world based on a variety of factors,
including (but not limited to) personal experiences, beliefs, interactions with
objects, ideas and other people, and, yes, schooling.
Through the reflexive and relentless
pursuit of personal meaning, learners’ interests and needs are constantly
shifting. This process defies the notion
that a fixed curriculum, which is an externally created and controlled body of
knowledge pertaining to one, conventionally understood world, can be taught
equally to all students and learned equally by all students. Student engagement with a teacher’s
curriculum, no matter how well conceived and how well “delivered” that
curriculum may be, remains a matter of personal choice for the learner. If the classroom environment permits the
learner to acknowledge and reveal his/her own world, and to rethink it based on
new information and experiences obtained through class lessons, the learner is
likely to become and remain engaged. If
the classroom environment fails to honor the learner’s personal world and
instead requires passive acceptance of conventionally accepted knowledge, the
learner is far more likely to figure out – and succumb to - the rules of the schooling
game: place information into short-term recall and mimic learning by memorizing
information for tests.
Our schools are filled with
“successful” students who are highly skilled at playing this game but who
actually learn very little. They attain high grades but find it difficult to transfer
and apply what they supposedly have learned. This is a concern often validated
by college professors who are continually surprised by how little high
achieving high school graduates really know when they enter post-secondary
settings, and by their inability to think creatively, reason analytically,
solve complex problems and persevere through activities that have no immediate
answer and require higher level thinking (Conley, 2010).
The intent here is not to minimize
the need to learn discrete information and have lessons structured around sound
curricula, or to dispute the need to assess student learning … or even to criticize
the desire to have students perform well on assessments. Students need to learn important information,
be exposed to rich curricula, and perform well on assessments. We need to be clear about what we want
students to learn, and be able to assess what students know and can do. And, our expectations must be high: we want our students to know and be able to
do a lot … and do it well.
But, what value do all these tests
really add? Good teachers know what their students understand at any given
point in time because they interact with them continually, pose questions
designed to have the students reveal their thinking and their knowledge (and
reveal their own personal questions, too), and require their students to
validate their understandings through discussions, demonstrations, projects,
performances, exhibitions and classroom tests.
Tests have a legitimate place in the continuum of assessment … but only
as one of multiple ways of coming to understand what students know, and coming
to know what students understand.
It is critical that we seek to
measure what is important, not simply what is easy to measure. It is far more
difficult to grade a two-week unit of study culminating in an trans-disciplinary
demonstration of what the student learned than it is to give a multiple choice
test at the end of the two weeks. While
the grading of the demonstration is nuanced and probably requires the teacher
to use a rubric and pose probing questions to determine if real understanding
was achieved by the student, and then to use his/her subjective judgment in
assessing the extent of the student’s knowledge, the 20-question, multiple
choice test requires only the ability to apply an answer sheet template and
multiply the number of right answers by 5 points each: 17 right answers = 85%. Done. If the real mission of schooling is the search
for understanding, then teachers need to be constant and continual assessors
seeking to discover what their students do and do not understand, and then
providing them with new opportunities to seek and construct knowledge and meaning. Assessment is an undeniably critical
component of this process. But,
assessment must have educational value and must be in service to student
learning, not driving it.
What Constructivism Looks Like In the Classroom
In a second grade math class I
observed, students were asked to write number sentences for the number
139. It was expected in this class that
each student would write at least ten different sentences. The students in this class wrote a wide
variety of sentences, with surprisingly little overlap. Some of the sentences chosen for discussion
in the class were:
{(60 x 2) + 15 + (4 x 1)}
{(30 x 3) + (80 ÷ 2) + (13 – 4)}
{75
+ 100 – 36}
{(5 x 5 x 5) +14}
{(45 ÷ 5) x 10 + 9 + (200 ÷ 5)}
There are various ways to structure the
teaching of math. One is to organize
lessons around the computation of the
right answer, and another is to structure lessons that promote the search
for multiple pathways to the right answer. The sentences above are examples of seeking
multiple paths to the right answer which, in this case, was already known by
the students: 139. Asking the students to write number sentences
leading to the already-known answer is a very different cognitive process than
giving students numbers and asking them to compute the answer … which is the
normative mathematical procedure in most classes and on most tests.
Accurate computation is undeniably important
in math, and so is conceptual understanding.
The students in this second grade class were developing a deeper
understanding of mathematical concepts with a purpose: deeper understanding leads to more proficient
and efficient computation. As the
students in this class were constructing deeper understandings, they also were honing
their computational skills in adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing,
all for the purpose of showing how to display the number 139.
Certainly, the teacher could have come at
this another way: she could have written
several number sentences for 139 herself – say, one that focused mostly on
addition, one that included subtraction, one that required multiplication, and
one that incorporated division - and had the students copy them into their
notebooks. But, instead, she asked the
students to construct the sentences themselves, and in so doing she valued
their thinking, learned about their individual skills and understandings, and simultaneously
generated a good deal of interest. Not
coincidentally, the students demonstrated that they understood a great deal
about math concepts and they also demonstrated the ability to compute and work
with numbers to solve problems.
Science lessons can be similarly
structured. For example, let’s return to
the question, “Why, no matter where we stand on Earth and no matter what time
of day or night it is, do we always see the same side of the moon?” In this lesson, the teacher begins with the
observed phenomenon (or, the “right” answer – we always see the same side of
the moon) and has the students search for the cause. This approach is counter to how most of us
were trained to teach (we were taught to teach the causes leading to the
phenomenon), but is a very powerful method for the construction of knowledge …
because the answer is already known, and the task of the students is to discover
why this phenomenon occurs.
The Rigor of Constructivism
Over the last few decades,
constructivism has been critiqued as lacking rigor by education policy makers
promoting the test-teach-test approach to reform. The most common criticism, and misunderstanding,
of constructivist approaches is that the curriculum is subordinate to student
interest: if the students aren’t
interested in the lesson’s topic, then constructivist teachers don’t teach it. This
“anything goes” critique is absurd and demonstrates an acute lack of
understanding about learning, in general, and constructivism, in particular.
(Grennon Brooks & Brooks, 1999)
Constructivist pedagogy is premised
on the belief that all topics in the curriculum can be taught (and learned),
and that relevance for the learner, if not present initially, can emerge
through the thoughtful intervention of the teacher. The lessons described above are examples of
this.
It is
essential to remember that learning is controlled by the learner, not the teacher. We can invite students to learn, but we can’t
mandate learning. This simple truth lies
at the heart of education. Consequently, the development and mediation of
mind-engaging activities are among the most crucial quests of teachers. Student engagement, so long misunderstood as
static, is in fact quite a dynamic phenomenon.
For example, a student not compelled by Shakespeare may find automobile
carburetors interesting, a student not excited by trigonometry many have great
facility with world languages, and a student not drawn to history may be a
computer whiz.
In other words, a student’s
disinterest about one topic in school does not presage disinterest in all
topics. Nor does it imply that a
student’s interest in topics initially viewed as uninteresting (Shakespeare,
trigonometry and history) can’t be piqued.
It can, and this is what good teachers do. As thinking and sensing
human beings, we are all unique. We each
have our own interests and our own needs fashioned out of our own sets of life
experiences. Our willingness to learn is a function of our quest for meaning. When
school structures, or any other structures for that matter, do not permit us to
construct meaning, we often become resistant, disinterested and
disengaged. But, when the individual
construction of meaning is acknowledged and honored, interest soars, engagement
has no limits, and we learn.
The Constructivist Approach to Teaching
Every day, students come to school
ready, willing and able to construct new understandings of their worlds. And every day, the methodologies teachers use
in their classrooms either block this from occurring or facilitate its
occurrence. Let’s look at two
examples.
Several years ago I had occasion to
visit a classroom in which 7th graders were asked to read and reflect
on a poem. After a few minutes of silent
reading, the teacher asked the students to interpret the first two lines of the
poem. One student volunteered that the
two lines evoked for her the image of a dream.
“Well, no,” she was told, “that’s not exactly what the author
meant.” Another student said that the
poem prompted him to think of a voyage on the sea. The teacher reminded this student that he was
only asked to think about the first two lines of the poem, not the entire poem,
but then quickly added that, no, the poem was not about the sea. Looking out at
the class, the teacher said, “Let’s try again. Who can interpret the first two
lines of the poem?” No other students
raised their hands.
In another classroom in this same
school, 9th grade students were asked to ponder the effect of
temperature on muscle movement. Students
had at their disposal ice, buckets of water, gauges for measuring finger/grip
strength, and other assorted materials and pieces of equipment. The teacher broke the class into groups of
four students, gave them some preliminary instructions, distributed a sheet of
paper with a few broad, framing questions, reminded them to use the materials
safely, and then turned them loose. He
moved about the room asking different questions to different groups of
students, questions that were dependent on the experiments each group was
constructing and the conclusions each group was drawing. No matter whether their answers to his
questions were “right” or “wrong,” he continually posed contradictions to their
responses. As the 42-minute period
neared its end, the students were asked to begin wrapping up their activities
and developing a hypothesis about the relationship between muscle movement and
temperature. The students expressed their
dismay about having to end their experiments, and asked if they could miss
their next class so they could stay and finish them. When told they couldn’t, several asked if
they could return to the classroom later that day to continue working on them
during their free periods. They were given permission to do so, and many
in the class returned by the end of the day.
In the first classroom, the teacher
communicated to her students that there is one right answer about the poem’s
meaning, and that she already knew that answer.
The students’ challenge, therefore, was to figure out the answer the
teacher already “knew” and feed it back to her.
Other ideas were rejected, kindly and politely, but rejected nonetheless
as not worthy of discussion. Thus, after
two students responses had been rebuked, none of the other students wished to
risk also being “wrong.” Additionally,
the teacher rejected one student’s interpretation of the poem on procedural
grounds – her directions to the class clearly stated that the students were to
focus on the first two lines of the poem, not the whole poem.
But, what was really tragic about
this lesson is that since only two students chose to participate, the teacher
had no mechanism to assess the meaning that the other students made of the poem,
and didn’t seem particularly interested in doing so. Their initial interpretations didn’t matter
to her. In speaking with her after the
lesson, she said that she planned to get at their interpretations through a
test she was planning to give to the students later that week, but the present
goal was to help the students understand what the author “really meant.”
In the science lesson, the teacher
also knew the “right” answer, an answer based on well-established scientific
principles, but having the students recite it back to him was not the purpose
of the activity. In fact, he challenged
all students’ answers, even when they were accurate. He was far more interested in the questions
his students were generating than the answers to those questions because he
knew that their questions were his window into their understanding of the
concepts that underpinned the activity, and would twig them to think more
deeply about the multiple concepts involved in the activity. It is highly unlikely that these 9th
graders spent much time prior to this lesson thinking about the relationship
between muscle movement and temperature.
The teacher helped the students to see relevance in a relationship they
had never before pondered by framing an activity around one big question
(concept), providing appropriate materials, and targeting questions to each
group based on his sense of their understanding and progress. He continually sought and valued and
challenged his students’ points of view, and he used their comments as both a
way to assess their present understandings and a way to promote additional
learning. No separate end-of-the-week
test was planned … or required.
Making Sense of Learning
Let’s revisit the critique that
constructivism lacks rigor. The thinking
behind this view is that constructivist teachers condone abandoning the
curriculum to pursue the situational whims and interests of their students. If, for example, most of the students in the
aforementioned 9th grade class wished to discuss the relationship
between physical exercise and muscle movement (or, for that matter, any
relationship other than the one initially presented by the teacher) rather than
engage in the planned lesson, that would have been fine. No, it wouldn’t have been fine, and the
teacher who conducted this lesson continually brought the students back to the
relationship between temperature and muscle movement.
The concerns about the constructivist
approach to education are rooted in the belief that the information, facts and
basic skills embedded in the curriculum, and necessary to pass high stakes
tests, are cast aside in pursuit of more ephemeral ideas. In math and science, particularly, there is
concern among traditionalists that basic factual information and procedural
knowledge are jettisoned in order to permit students to “think mathematically
and scientifically.”
For example, in the 7th
grade English lesson described above, the critique would be that there is one
main idea of the poem, and that having all students learn the main would have
fallen prey to a lengthy and unfocused discussion of the students’
idiosyncratic interpretations. No, it
wouldn’t have. Through a class
discussion, students would have been exposed to a variety of interpretations
about the main idea, and the teacher – if one main idea really existed and if
she truly knew that idea (both of which are doubtful) – easily could have
brought the discussion back to that idea.
Constructivist teachers recognize
that students bring their prior experiences and understandings with them to
each new school activity and lesson. In other words, they are not the empty
vessels some would like to think they are (Pinker, 2003), and thus it is
critical for their lessons and activities to connect with the students’
experiences and understandings. To a
large degree, relevance and interest are more closely related to the learners’
experiences than the teachers’ planning.
Consequently, it is not only inappropriate to ignore students’ points of
view, it usually is educationally counterproductive.
It is important to reiterate that
constructivist teachers present all of the relevant facts, information and
skills that students are required to know, but they do so within the context of
discussions about larger ideas. For
example, it is common for middle and high school students learning about the
American Civil War to be expected to know key dates, battle sites and the names
of various generals who led their troops into these battles, and these pieces
of information are often presented to students sequentially for rote
memorization to be fed back on subsequent tests.
Constructivist teachers try to
establish a broader context before presenting factual information, and do so by
engaging their students in discussions of large issues, such as slavery,
territorial expansion, states’ rights v. federal control, economics, and the
technology of war, to name just five.
Without these broader contexts, the dates, battles and names of generals
are simply an exercise in students’ abilities to memorize facts for short-term
recall, and the ones who do it best get the highest grades. We know that in
school we can get students to memorize information and correctly answer
questions on tests, but at what price: without
the broader context, what will they remember in three days, three weeks, three
months, or three years … what have they really learned?
Constructivism as an approach to
education does not alter what students are expected to learn, it alters how
students are expected to learn, and honors the difference between authentic
learning and mimicked learning.