Constructivist Theories
The Saturday before I started my PGCE course, the Institute of Physics (IoP) organises an event for their scholars. Present at the event is also an ex-PGCE IoP scholar from the previous cohort, who is now doing a part-time MA in education science at my university alongside a part-time teaching job in a secondary school. The president of the IoP makes a short speech that he concludes with some words along the lines of “There is nothing better than getting a physics explanation except maybe giving it”. The MA student takes the floor just after him, and she comes back to his words, saying that she would even take it a step further and say that there is something better than giving a physics explanation: it is letting the students discover the explanation by themselves. Having already read over the summer some books on education science, I know exactly what ideological strand she is adhering to, and I am not surprised she is doing a MA in education. Obviously she is referring to ‘constructivism’.
Now, logically, I should give a definition of constructivism. I will try — but this happens to be a very difficult undertaking as it is a sort of catch-all concept. At the origin, constructivism is a learning theory rooted in the work of Piaget. According to Piaget, children progress through four universal stages of cognitive development. Development is therefore biologically based and changes as the child matures. The mind is furthermore structured in schemas, i.e. cognitive structures that consist of facts, ideas, and associations organised into a meaningful system of relationships. The schema is not fixed and constantly changes, especially as the child progresses from one stage to the other. While, during a learning process, a child can assimilate new information into their existing schema, sometimes there is a ‘clash’, and accommodation of their schema to the new information has to occur. This process is often called conceptual change. This theory is ‘revolutionary’ in so far as the child is not seen as a passive learner any more — the children have to be actively involved in the learning process for true learning to occur. It is said that they construct their own knowledge. So far, so good — it all sounds pretty sensible and reasonable. This ‘construction’, however, is open to various interpretations, which will have many different implications for teaching. During the course of our PGCE year, we heard of all the following teaching techniques under the umbrella of ‘constructivism’, or, equivalently, ‘what you have to do’.
Misconceptions and dialogic teaching
We are told first that the essential point of constructivism for teachers is to understand that a child doesn’t arrive at school with a blank mind, ready to receive knowledge transmitted by a teacher, but instead has already at their disposal some prior knowledge, organised in a schema. This prior knowledge, however, can be … — I do not dare here to write the word wrong, because, as we will see, it is something that should be avoided, at least according to some constructivist views of knowledge. Since even ‘misconception’ may still be somehow too harsh, we should rather use ‘prior conception’, or ‘alternative conception’. Let’s start over then: some students may hold alternative conceptions, and our role as a teacher is to identify these and try to confront the students with some new information which would lead to a clash and hopefully a conceptual change. Here we are told that just telling the students does not work. The students have to actively experience the clash for the conceptual change — and deep learning — to happen. For that purpose, dialogic teaching is put forward, a technique that involves sequences made of a (good) question asked by the teacher followed by one or several responses by pupils and concluded by the feedback or evaluation by the teacher. This technique, however, has received some criticism by education scientists who argued that this type of dialogue is not natural — it would never occur in the ‘normal’ world that someone asks a question to which they already know the answer. It seems sometimes that even education scientists have forgotten what it is to teach — or even to be a parent. Would they say to a young parent that they are wrong to ask their little one: “what is the colour of your toy?” — when they already know the answer?
Scaffolding
In dialogic teaching, the role of the teacher is essential for helping the learning process. Another teaching technique, called scaffolding, involves an active teacher as well. The teacher identifies what their students need to access the very next step (a specific goal), and thus provides for helpful, structured interaction with their students to support them achieving this goal. Once the students master the task, the scaffolding can be removed, and the students can work independently on similar tasks. For instance, when children learn about addition of two-digit numbers, they may need to use 10-based materials to model their numbers (ones are modelled with cubes and tens with rods). This helps them realise that they only need to add the ones together and the tens together to find the sum (and, in a second stage, they will encounter sums where the sum of ones may exceed 10, so that a new rod can replace 10 ones). The use of concrete materials is a scaffolding — it is here only to help the student understand the concept and the method. Similarly, a scaffolded multi-step maths problem consists in guiding students to the solution using one question for each step, while the non-scaffolded version only asks one question. The term scaffolding coined by Jerome Bruner is very similar to Vygotsky’s concept of ‘zone of proximal development’ and is often referred to as ‘guided learning’ as well.
Group work and social constructivism
Interaction, guidance and encouragement play a central role in both dialogic teaching and scaffolding. In dialogic teaching, a special emphasis is put on the role of language and formulating ideas with one’s own words. In his model of zone of proximal development, Vygotsky suggested that less competent children develop with help from more skilful peers — a concept called collaborative learning. This can be taken a step further with the idea that best learning takes place when knowledge is constructed as the result of interactions with one’s peers. This is called social constructivism and places group work at the top of the hierarchy of teaching techniques. The role of teachers is then to make groups, assign roles to students in each group and give a task.
Discovery learning
Constructivism claims that students construct their own knowledge, and Jerome Bruner (1960) furthermore suggested that the most effective way for them to do that is to discover it rather than being told by the teacher. The teacher therefore does not teach in the sense of giving a piece of knowledge, but is instead a ‘learning facilitator’ in that he or she brings to the attention of the students some elements or pieces of information but doesn’t tell them what they are supposed to conclude by putting all these pieces together. Bruner actually saw a virtue in this ‘method of discovery’ more in the process of working than in what exactly is being discovered since discovery implies that the student is cognitively active. He furthermore underlined that “discovery, with the understanding and mastery it implies, becomes its own reward, a reward that is intrinsic to the activity of working”. This prescription is not without problems that Bruner identified himself, for instance that “one cannot leave the curriculum entirely open and let discovery flourish willy-nilly wherever it may occur”.
Teaching science through inquiry
Discovery stipulated on one hand by Bruner and the fact that science is essentially experimental in nature on the other hand led to another idea, namely that science should be taught through inquiry. Inquiry, in its more restrictive meaning, (which is slightly different from enquiry,) means a formal investigation. Depending on the amount of guidance given by the teacher to their students, different types of inquiry can be implemented in the classroom (essentially open vs. guided inquiry). According to The National Science Education Standards, “Inquiry [in education] is a multifaceted activity that involves making observations; posing questions; examining books and other sources of information to see what is already known; planning investigations; reviewing what is already known in light of experimental evidence; using tools to gather, analyse, and interpret data; proposing answers, explanations, and predictions; and communicating the results. Inquiry requires identification of assumptions, use of critical and logical thinking, and consideration of alternative explanations.”
This definition sounds to me pretty much like the definition of the work of an experimental scientist. All the skills mentioned are indeed what a student is expected to develop in the course of a Ph.D. program, which lasts at minimum 3 years, and is generally undertaken after a BSc or MSc. It means that a great deal of knowledge in the discipline is deemed necessary before one can learn and practice its methods and processes during a Ph.D. In inquiry-based teaching, the reverse assumption is made: a student will learn a discipline by experiencing its methods and processes. Not that setting up an inquiry in the classroom is pointless, but the claim that science should be taught exclusively through inquiry seems to be at least questionable, at least within the time allotted to science lessons.
Radical constructivism and the relationship between knowledge and reality
The last strand of constructivism we had a flavour of during our course is called radical constructivism, and one of its famous advocates is Ernst von Glasersfeld. The epistemological pillar of radical constructivism originates in Kuhn’s view of science that every observation is value-laden. In turn, adepts of radical constructivism consider that knowledge does not reflect an “objective” reality, but exclusively an ordering and organisation of a world constituted by our experience. In other words, every individual, with their own subjectivity and own experience, will construct their own experiential world, their own… knowledge. In this context, teaching can only be a funny business as there is no unique ‘knowledge’ — which, at this point, should be called simply belief, as Michael Matthews argues. One understands why it is then stipulated that we, future teachers, should not give any explanations — only instructions — to our students. Never tell them the answer! Let them find it out on their own!! As the French would say, these guys clearly smoked carpet[1].
If these constructivist theories were confined to the education research world, then maybe we would regret that our tax money be spent on such ludicrous research, and that would be it. But, unfortunately, they do shape our education system, starting with the teacher training course. To help PGCE students grow into effective teachers, PGCE teachers should explicitly recognise that there are many ways to teach — calling them teaching theories if they want, and avoiding branding them all constructivism. And above all, they should stop expecting that PGCE students apply simultaneously what is prescribed by all variants of constructivism. Short of becoming schizophrenic, I don’t see any possibility in reconciling all constructivist strands. However, this is exactly what we were supposed to be doing — everything and its opposite. As Josh, a ‘senior’ chap like me in the PGCE course, so rightly said about the lack of clarity in the instructions on how to teach, “If it was not so distressing, it would be funny.”
[1] In French: “ces types ont fumé la moquette”, meaning their brain is functioning so strangely that they must be under the influence of some strong chemicals.
Bibliography
Bruner J. (1960). On learning mathematics, The Mathematics Teacher, 53, 610–619
Kirschner, P.A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006). Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Base, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching, Educational Psychologist, 41(2), 75–86
Matthews, M. R. (2002). Constructivism and Science Education: A Further Appraisal, Journal of Science Education and Technologies, 11, 121–134
McLeod S. A. (2012). Zone of Proximal Development. Retrieved from www.simplypsychology.org/Zone-of-Proximal-Development.html
Olson S., & and Loucks-Horsley, S. (2000). Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards: A Guide for Teaching and Learning, National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved from http://nap.edu/9596
J. Piaget. J. (1954). The construction of reality in the child (M. Cook, Trans.). New York, NY, US: Basic Books. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/11168-000
Posner, G. J., Strike, K. A., Hewson, P. W., & and Gertzog, W. A. (1982). Accommodation of a scientific conception: Toward a theory of conceptual change, Science Education, 66(2), 211–227.
