The Gems of the Dish: Benefits and Suggestions

What are the benefits of incorporating constructivist principles?

1. Benefit: Children learn more, and enjoy learning more when they are actively involved, rather than passive listeners.
2. Benefit: Education works best when it concentrates on thinking and understanding, rather than on rote memorization. Constructivism concentrates on learning how to think and understand. 
3. Benefit: Constructivist learning is transferable. In constructivist classrooms, students create organizing principles that they can take with them to other learning settings. 
4. Benefit: Constructivism gives students ownership of what they learn, since learning is based on students’ questions and explorations, and often the students have a hand in designing the assessments as well. Constructivist assessment engages the students’ initiatives and personal investments in their journals, research reports, physical models, and artistic representations. Engaging the creative instincts develops students’ abilities to express knowledge through a variety of ways. The students are also more likely to retain and transfer the new knowledge to real life. 
5. Benefit: By grounding learning activities in an authentic, real-world context, constructivism stimulates and engages students. Students in constructivist classrooms learn to question things and to apply their natural curiosity to the world. 
6. Benefit: Constructivism promotes social and communication skills by creating a classroom environment that emphasizes collaboration and exchange of ideas. Students must learn how to articulate their ideas clearly as well as to collaborate on tasks effectively by sharing in group projects. Students must therefore exchange ideas and so must learn to “negotiate” with others and to evaluate their contributions in a socially acceptable manner. This is essential to success in the real world, since they will always be exposed to a variety of experiences in which they will have to cooperate and navigate among the ideas of others.

Concept to Classroom, Constructivism as a Paradigm for Teaching and Learning (2004).

 

Suggestions for Teaching with the Constructivist Learning Theory

• Encourage and accept student autonomy and initiative.
• Try to use raw data and primary sources, in addition to manipulative, interactive, and physical materials.
• When assigning tasks to the students, use cognitive terminology such as “classify,” “analyze,” “predict,” and “create.”
• Build off and use student responses when making “on-the-spot” decisions about teacher behaviors, instructional strategies, activities, and content to be taught.
• Search out students’ understanding and prior experiences about a concept before teaching it to them.
• Encourage communication between the teacher and the students and also between the students.
• Encourage student critical thinking and inquiry by asking them thoughtful, open-ended questions, and encourage them to ask questions to each other.
• Ask follow up questions and seek elaboration after a student’s initial response.
• Put students in situations that might challenge their previous conceptions and that will create contradictions that will encourage discussion.
• Make sure to wait long enough after posing a question so that the students have time to think about their answers and be able to respond thoughtfully.
• Provide enough time for students to construct their own meaning when learning something new.

Brooks, J. and Brooks, M. (1993). In Search of Understanding: The Case for Constructivist Classrooms, ASCD