If there was a cartoon drawn for comparison’s sake of the differences between a behaviorist approach and a constructivist approach to teaching it could be summarized with the following narrative.
B: Please sit still and I will tell you everything I know…. because you know very little – and I get paid to share this information with you. And stop talking
C: But I’m only chatting with my partner about something I saw on TV related to this topic
B: You couldn’t possibly have anything insightful or relevant to contribute. Please open your text resource to p. Wahhmmp wahhhmpp wahhhmpp wahhhmpp wahmp.
C (internalized): Man I get tired of this guy yipping at us. And this textbook is out of date. When do we get to go into the lab and do something fun?
It was easy to appreciate the author’s strong opinions on this issue because it sincerely mirrored much of my personal experience with education from the age of 11-16. And truth be told, I’m rather surprised I stuck it out with continuing education because my experience in post secondary paralleled high school quite closely. It was the love of new knowledge that really kept me hooked, and this type of motivation isn’t always present in the students I work with currently.
When Von Glaserfeld argues that communication is about so much more than a vehicle for the knower to transfer his/her understanding to the learner I almost danced a gig. This ties strongly into my cultural understanding and experience in Aboriginal Education, specifically with oral history and Aboriginal epistemology. The author further elaborated how Western education has been “heavily conditioned by centuries of use of written language.” And maybe this means we’ve thrown the baby out with the bath water…. Perhaps in our efforts, since the Industrial Revolution, to design education around written language we have dismissed some of the key effective strategies that have been a part of our pedagogical practices since the beginning of our beginning? Like story-telling, mentoring practices, play, and shadowing.
On another note, I have never given much thought to how I impart skills through my coaching vs. my classroom teaching. And I really had to chuckle when I realized that almost all of the activities that I use when introducing the skills and fundamentals of my sport have a seed of ZPD. I don’t give the players a rule book, a lecture and then an assessment on what they’ve learned the next day. They get a basic introduction – and then we play. And it is directly through the experiential aspects of this play that they build their understanding of the further fundamentals required for fuller proficiency in the sport. As to how this might unfold in a Biology 12 classroom when I am trying to teach Biochemistry, I am not sure that I have the answer. Does anyone else have any ideas?
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