I have always been a fan of learning by doing so the concept of constructivism has always appealed to me. Over the years I have endeavoured to make my lesson as hands on and engaging as possible. To this end I created in 2006 what I thought was a student driven lesson that was of the constructivist mode. Having completed this ETEC 530 I seized the opportunity to revisit this lesson and apply my new found knowledge to it. What was most eerie this experience is the fact that I was constructing my knowledge of constructivism while I was creating the lesson.
The lesson’s development progressed in an iterative layered manner as every time thought it was complete I found I had to modify to make it more constructivist in nature. The first problem was the old lesson was of the old content strong mode that presented ‘knowledge’ instead of allowing students to derive it for themselves. So I now had to consider the essential concepts in a different light in that I had to consider best I could create the environment and experience to enable students to derive the meaning of these concepts from them. As a result I had to throw out most of the content of the old lesson to give the students more time to create knowledge. Another major issue I had to contend with was that back in 2006 I had no knowledge of CCM, CIM and POE so a considerable amount of time was spent tweaking the lesson to suit these as much as possible. Probably the biggest problem I had was the time for I found it almost impossible to condense everything I wanted in the one hour time frame because the nature of costructivism means that time cannot be assigned to learning.
I am walking away from this experience with the conviction that the construction of knowledge is like a work of art in that it is never truly finished. So I am still in the process of constructing knowledge about constructing knowledge.
Patason