In constructivist classrooms, unlike the conventional lecturer, the teacher is a facilitator and a guide, who plans, organizes, guides, and provides directions to the learner, who is accountable for his own learning. The teacher supports the learner by means of suggestions that arise out of ordinary activities, by challenges that inspire creativity, and with projects that allow for independent thinking and new ways of learning information. Students work in groups to approach problems and challenges in real world situations, this in turn leads to the creation of practical solutions and a diverse variety of student products. Constructivist theories have found more popularity with the advent of personal computers in classrooms and homes. PCs provide individual students with tools to experiment and build their own learning at their own pace. With the use of the web, the learner can now conduct research, interact with diverse populations, share ideas, and work on group projects. The assessment tool in a constructivist classroom is not a test or a quiz, rather it is the learner product; most of the time this is in a portfolio format that has been designed by the learner.

Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky are two eminent figures in the development of constructivist theories. They share the common belief that classrooms must be constructivist environments; however, there are differences in terms of their theories and variations as to how constructivism should be carried out in classrooms. 

Piaget’s Constructivism

Jean Piaget (1896-1980), remembered for his extensive research on developmental psychology, explains the learning process by schemes (the organization of information on how things work), assimilation (the placing of new information into schemes), and accommodation (transforming existing schemes or creating new ones). The motivation for learning is the predisposition of the learner to adapt to his environment, hence to institute equilibrium between schemes and the environment. Continuous interactions among existing schemes, assimilation, accommodation, and equilibrium create new learning.

Piaget explores four sequential stages of the psychological development of the young learner and believes teachers should be cognizant of these stages. During the Sensory-motor Stage, (before the age of 2) sensory experiences and motor activities dominate. Intelligence is intuitive in nature and knowledge; it is acquired through mental representation during the Preoperational Stage (from age 2 to age 7). At the Concrete Operational Stage (from age 7 to age 11), intelligence is logical, conserved, and dependent on concrete references. The Formal Operational Stage (after 11 years of age) is the stage when abstract thinking starts and the learner starts thinking about probabilities, associations, and analogies.

Piaget’s developmental theory of learning and constructivism are based on discovery. According to his constructivist theory, in order to provide an ideal learning environment, children should be allowed to construct knowledge that is meaningful for them. 

The Piagetian Classroom

Piaget believes that a constructivist classroom must provide a variety of activities to challenge students to accept individual differences, increase their readiness to learn, discover new ideas, and construct their own knowledge.

Videodisks, CD-ROMs and simulation software enhance learning, while telecommunication tools, like e-mail and the Internet, provide contexts for dialogue and interaction within the classroom, the schools, and the community leading to the social construction of knowledge. Students have the opportunity to be exposed to other ideas, cultures, and forums on global issues. Students can work on collaborative projects, which may come in the form of a networked writing project, or the building of separate phases of an engineering project that enables them to receive and give instant responses.

In an elementary Piagetian classroom, concrete learning experiences, such as drawing, drama, model building and field trips that involve hands-on opportunities to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are essential. These early activities and the use of tangible manipulatives and visual aids serve as building blocks for more sophisticated tasks, such as reading comprehension.

Vygotsky’s Constructivism

Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), known for his theory of social constructivism, believes that learning and development is a collaborative activity and that children are cognitively developed in the context of socialization and education. The perceptual, attention, and memory capacities of children are transformed by vital cognitive tools provided by culture, such as history, social context, traditions, language, and religion. For learning to occur, the child first makes contact with the social environment on an interpersonal level and then internalizes this experience. The earlier notions and new experiences influence the child, who then constructs new ideas. Vygotsky’s (1978, p. 56) example of being able to point a finger displays how this behavior, which begins as a simple motion, becomes a meaningful movement when others react to the gesture.

Vygotsky’s constructivism is known as social constructivism because of the significance of culture and social context. For Vygotsky, the zone of proximal development “. . . the distance between the actual development of a child as determined by the independent problem solving, and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more peers (Vygotsky: 1978)” suggests that cognitive development is limited to a certain range at a particular age. However, with the help of social interaction, such as assistance from a mentor, students can comprehend concepts and schemes that they cannot know on their own. Curriculum specialists and lesson plan builders can use the zone of proximal development as a guiding reference.

The Vygotskian Classroom

A Vygotskian classroom emphasizes creating one’s own concepts and making knowledge one’s property; this requires that school learning takes place in a meaningful context, alongside the learning that occurs in the real world. As seen earlier in the Piagetian classroom, this model also promotes the active participation and collaboration of distinctive learners. The Vygotskian classroom stresses assisted discovery through teacher-student and student-student interaction. Some of the cognitive strategies that group members bring into the classroom are questioning, predicting, summarizing, and clarifying.

In a Vygotskian classroom, dynamic support and considerate guidance are provided based on the learner’s needs, but no will or force is dictated. Students are exposed to discussions, research collaborations, electronic information resources, and project groups that work on problem analysis.

Some examples of classroom activities that might be used in a constructive classroom are as follows:

Students in a political science class can use a computer simulation to decide on global issues as representatives of United Nations. A geography class studying Turkey can take a virtual trip of tourist and historical sites and parks. The journalism class may publish a newsletter with scanned photographs, excerpts from the press and charts about a recent journey to space. As a final project, a sixth-grade history teacher may assign her students multimedia presentations of civilizations that prospered in Southern America. An aquatic science class could observe data on city water quality and communicate with students in other schools. The multiculturalism class students can build online genograms (family trees), and subscribe to genogram databases in search for relatives and the origin of their roots. 

Conclusion

Both Piaget and Vygotsky appreciated the essence of building constructs and internalizing the knowledge given, rather than accepting the information as presented through rote-memory. Constructivist learning environments promote the learner to gather, filter, analyze, and reflect on the information provided and to comment on this knowledge so that it will result in individualized comprehension and private learning.

This type of group learning will reduce the dissemination of false data, prejudice, and atrocities among diverse groups and help build a moral, scientific, information society in the new millennium. Be it developmental or social as suggested by Piaget and Vygotsky respectively, learning is the central activity for humans in search for understanding the causes and effects of natural phenomena, the progress of social events, and the meaning of life. By using such learning approaches we can better introduce our children to the world that God has created for us, and lead them to think about the miracles that are all around us.

Although it is difficult to explain the concept of understanding briefly, we will try to give a brief account of its meaning and consequences in the context of teaching from the viewpoint of constructivist learning.

Is it sensible to assume that ‘Everything which has been taught has also been understood’? Accumulating research on understanding reveals that it is not that simple. Not every teaching generates understanding. Von Glasersfeld (1990), commenting on the present situation, argues that something must be wrong as some children are leaving school unable to read and write or handle numbers properly, and knowing nothing about the scientific nature of the world. He relates this to teaching practices derived from behaviourist models; he is critical of the removal of the distinction between training on the one hand and, on the other, teaching which aims at generating understanding. Whether training manages to generate understanding is, he says, a matter of chance.

Understanding, in fact, is a very complex phenomenon to describe both philosophically and practically. In one attempt to do so (Skemp, 1989), two categories of understanding are defined: relational and instrumental. Relational understanding corresponds to intelligent learning. Instrumental understanding means habit-learning or learning ‘rules without reasons’. The advantages of instrumental understanding are: its being easier to grasp; providing more immediate and obvious rewards; and yielding the right answers more quickly. The advantages of relational understanding, on the other hand, are: it is more adaptable to new tasks; and what is learnt is easier to remember.

A shift towards relational understanding may provide the necessary motivation for students to learn more effectively. However, teaching for relational understanding suffers a major drawback. Selinger (1994) states: ‘Encouraging pupils to learn more relationally can be problematic for both teachers and their pupils; the investment required to make connections is greater than in instrumental learning and the contents of the curriculum need to be considered, so that connections can be easily and readily established.’

II. CONSTRUCTIVISM IN THE CLASSROOM

In constructivism, knowledge is always contextual. The so-called “objective” mathematical knowledge is the product of active construction which we make and share with others (Wood, 1995). Understanding, then, means constructing acts on the shared mathematical objects (ibid.).

The two major assumptions of constructivism can he summarised as follows (Caprio, 1995):

a) Knowledge is not objective, and does not have an absolute structure. What we know and understand is only our perceptions of reality.

b) Teachers help students to develop new insights. This is done by leading students to develop their own analogies, examples and non-examples, proof methods, new ways of solving a problem etc. The teacher, in short, attempts to teach thinking.

In the behavouristic model, the body of knowledge in. a subject-matter is the object of teaching. The teacher’s task is to transmit (or inject) that knowledge into the learner (who does not have it) through an adequate discourse. Constructivism questions this transmission-based approach. It assumes that students have their own paradigms before coming to class, some of which are invalid or incomplete. The duty of the teacher is to guide students on their way through reaching out to that in the knowledge they bring to class which is viable.

According to Pateman and Johnson (1990), constructivist ideas have influenced teaching practices. Teachers need to set up the temporal, discursive and cognitive space for students to construct concepts (Mousley, 1993). Mousley uses the term “moments” to describing the events in the classroom in which teachers and students create space for themselves; this term reflects the immediate nature of very small periods in which the potential of the lesson changes continuously. Her observations indicate that the decisions taken by the teacher in those moments help or prevent students to make sense. That is, the learners do not have command of the learning situation. Learning still depends on the teachers’ residual authority. Therefore, she suggests, teachers should leave more interpretive space in the learning process by presenting the students with loosely-defined tasks.

Jaworski (1994), commenting on the demands of constructivism on teaching methods, says that getting inside the head of the student helps teachers to build a model of the student’s conceptual level; language is a tool for that purpose, and the errors and apparent misconceptions of students can provide the feedback information the teacher needs to understand and adapt to the student’s level of understanding.

Teaching is heavily reliant on what the learner already knows. The duty of the teacher, in the constructivist model, is to help the student to construct new knowledge or discriminate alternative concepts, and to guide them to commonly shared concepts.

Constructivism, being a theory of learning, does not say much directly about teaching methods. Instead, it specifies the methods that are not appropriate (Orton, 1994). But since teaching and learning are complementary and reciprocal, it is inevitable that this theory has many implications for teaching. Von Glaserfeld (1987), for instance, listed some possible consequences of constructivism for teaching:

a) There will be a separation between teaching of understanding and training which aims (only) at repetition of behaviours.

b) Educators will be interested in what is going on in the minds of the children rather than in their overt responses.

c) The teacher will realise that language is a tool to help learners to construct understanding, rather than a mechanism for transferring knowledge.

d) There is a shift in the perception of errors from being something undesirable (which teaching should eliminate) to being possible indicators of the process whereby students make sense of their experiential worlds. The teacher’s duty is to detect those errors which yield information about how and why the child deviates from the teacher’s expectations.

e) There is a shift toward seeking knowledge about learners’ conceptual structures and finding ways to modify them.

A metaphor for teaching in the constructivist framework is “facilitate” (Lerman, 1993), as opposed to “inject” for the typical behaviourist approach.

Making Students Make Sense

Mason (1989) lists some aims of a teacher concerned to help his or her students make sense. He would like students to have seen connections, experienced a crystallisation of experiences subsumed under a general concept, gained a sense of coherence of a topic etc. Elaborating on the issue of the aims of teacher and students, Mason states that “subordination of teaching to learning” and “starting where the students are” do not mean that the teacher’s aims are the same as those of students. Rather, the aims should be confluent. The factors that determine student success in these aims depend on: teacher attitudes toward learning and teaching; the interest and commitment of the teacher; the extent to which teaching evokes students’ capabilities; and the extent to which students share the teacher’s goals.

Listening to the students while they are trying to make sense is a powerful way to get to know how they understand a topic. This talking can be among themselves or with the teacher. The ideal would be to talk to students about their understanding individually, but that is practically impossible. If they are talking with each other, the teacher can listen to different groups and gets an overall sense. Teachers’ dependence on that “overall sense” may not always be a reliable basis for making decisions about any individual student, but in a classroom situation it is inevitable.

III. TEACHING FOR UNDERSTANDING

Helping children to develop their perceptions is more productive than helping them to acquire particular ideas or bits of information. The necessary and sufficient condition for achieving this is to have a rough understanding of their current perceptions. It is essential for the teacher to have knowledge about pupils’ past experiences so that remedial actions may take place accordingly (Threlfall 1990).

Discovery and inquiry-based methods are acceptable ways to facilitate understanding. What is not good for the teacher is to sit back and await answers from the students without putting in any effort. Rather, the teacher should arrange the learning environment in order to enable useful experiences for the students. Although they can use some directive statements sometimes, much talking on the part of the teacher does not contribute to better understanding on the part of the learner (Orton & Frobisher, 1996).

Rote Learning vs. Meaningful Learning

Meaningful learning occurs if previously isolated bits of information are organised and restructured into new relationships. In other words, meaningful learning takes place as new knowledge is integrated into the learner’s existing knowledge. There is no one-and-only methods (e.g. discovery learning) for making this happen. Any method, such as expository teaching, is appropriate if it ensures that new learning is linked to existing knowledge (Orton, 1987).

In rote learning generally, the schema remain fixed. What is learned remains closely tied to where it has been learned, therefore it cannot be generalised to other contexts. It stays the memory as isolated bits of information. The learning of bare facts and procedures falls in this category.

Despite having little effect on learning, repetition and drill may be useful for the acquisition of declarative knowledge (Mayer, 1983). Repetition influences not only how much is learned but also the structure of what is learned. In fact, there is a misunderstanding, says Von Glasersfeld (1990), about the role of rote learning and memorization. He states that, they are not unnecessary. There are matters that simply have to be learned in a direct mechanical way. Orton (1994) argues that rote-learning has unfairly been associated with behaviourism and is a necessary method for learning. It takes place in a natural way.

Discovery Learning

Students in discovery learning situations are led, with limited teacher support, to discover the abstract from the concrete, and encouraged to make connections from seemingly disconnected events. In other words, discovery learning transfers the burden from the teacher to the student (Corno and Snow, 1986).

Discovery learning is advocated by constructivism because of the opportunities for discussion, negotiation and the exchange of ideas (Orton, 1994). The teacher’s role here is to initiate students to make their own interpretations which makes it easier for them to learn. But case studies conducted in classrooms reveal that what the teachers claim to be discovery learning is not discovery learning in its fullest sense (Wood, et al., 1990). The teachers rather impose on students what they are supposed to discover.

IV. CONCLUSION

No two students are same. Hence, it is impossible to find two identical teaching experiences. That is, “there is no royal road to teaching and learning.” The suggestions for good teaching do not comprise a method but rather promote a perspective. The teacher cannot do the learning for any pupil (Mason, 1989). At the end of the day, the so called “transmission process” (Jaworski, 1989) depends on students’ own construction of what the teacher says. It, indeed, is not surprising that there frequently is a discrepancy between the two.

Finally, understanding is not the comprehension of an absolute reality but establishing a fit between the old and the new experience (Von Glasersfeld 1984 in Jaworski, 1994). To make students attain understanding, teachers should keep in mind that the teacher’s role is as a facilitator, setting up constructivist learning environments which provide useful experiences for students; there is no ready-made teaching strategy for facilitating understanding: a constructivist approach can use a repertoire of methods, the only thing excluded is passivity on the part of teachers or students; finally, teachers’ knowledge of what their students already know is the only source enabling them to plan their actions.

References 

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