Constructionist Theory in Action

It's so much fun to find the proper names for the various strategies we've been using as teachers for so long. It turns out I'm a constructionist! This would undoubtedly make my father proud as he is a construction professional and has long wondered why I fail so abysmally at things like putting up new sheetrock and installing new garage doors... but I digress.

We've been asked this week to take a look at constructionism and how it applies not only to our own teaching but to discuss some of the various activities that were exposed to us this week in our materials. For any readers who may not be up to speed on constructionism (I undoubtedly have many many visitors who are not part of my current classes) I will quickly summarize constructionist theory. Dr. Michael Orey, an associate professor at Georgia described constructionism as a theory of learning wherein people learn best when they build or produce something tangible that they can share with or show to other people (Laureate Education, 2009). So essentially all those craft projects and collages and mobiles and every physical 'thing' you've had your students or children build for you fit under the category of constructionism assuming that you've had them create these objects for the purpose of learning about some topic or system.

Orey further points out that constructionist learning theory builds upon the tenets of Jean Piaget regarding how people learn. These tenets on a basic level suggest that people build concepts, or boxes if you will of the world and everything in it (Laureate Education, 2009). So, you undoubtedly have a "horse box" or a construct that contains the essential information you know of that defines a horse. That may include an animal with 4 legs that is generally tall, that has a long face and may be ridden. I'm certain there are more details in your "horse box". Piaget called this construct your schema (Laureate Education, 2009). Now, sometimes you run into something new... which may or may not easily fit into your "horse box". Perhaps you see a new kind of horse, let's say a miniature pony. Now... While this thing generally looks like a horse for the most part, it's entirely to short to fit easily into your general concept of what a horse is. This incongruity between the horse-thing you're looking at and your schema of what a horse should be is called dis-equilibration (Laureate Education, 2009).

Now, we know that people don't like things that don't fit. An entire entertainment industry has been created to give us jigsaw puzzles because people have a deep-seated NEED for things to fit. That need causes us to do one of two things with our minature pony that doesn't quite work with our horse box. We can adapt our view of the outside world to fit our schema, a practice called assimilation (Laureate Education, 2009). Alternately, we can modify our concept of what should be a "horse" to include the new miniature pony. This is called accommodation (Laureate Education, 2009). Most likely we will accommodate the miniature pony and make a minor enhancement to our "horse box" to include the fact that horses CAN be very small, like a miniature pony. In this way we have increased our concept of horses and simply learned something new about them.

Whew... that was a long and probably less than thrilling overview of some basic constructionist stuff. Now, what you are wondering (I kid myself, I know) is how does this idea of constructionism or creating a tangible artifact tie in with those learning principles. (You may also be wondering why you never had a pony as a child, but again... I digress.) In order to modify our schema and either build up our concepts of things in the world or learn to interpret what we see differently so it makes sense to us, students need to actively think and do. This means that by creating a new item, perhaps a collage made from clipped magazine pictures students have to locate photographs that somehow match the schema concepts of what they are supposed to be creating and then tie them in with the theme. In many cases this can be difficult. There may be a shortage of photographs or the theme may simply be difficult to summarize in pictures. Therefore, students have to really consider their schema and find a way to equilibrate the items they have to construct their artifact with the thematic concepts they are trying to express.

And building the object is only half the process. When the students subsequently present and explain their process in creating the montage, they are continuing to work on equilibration and in that process strengthening their schema.

The material this week showed a couple of examples of tools or lessons teachers can use to include technology in their classrooms while offering students the chance to create their own artifacts. One example demonstrated the use of excel to help students learn fairly complex concepts about money, investment and compound interest ((Pitler et. al, 2007). While I thought this example was certainly interesting and would help students learn the value of investment, I did not feel that the artifact created by the students was significantly meaningful to them to really help drive the point home. I would have preferred to have the students themselves learn how to enter the formulae and create the entire spreadsheet instead of merely having to enter a single value and having the rest of the data auto-generate. While I appreciate the time-savings that method provides, I simply feel that the students didn't necessarily have enough personal involvement to really feel like they 'created something'.

Another example had students making predictions about acid rain content in their local water sources and tracking information that they collected in a spreadsheet to demonstrate the level of acidity in their local water sources ((Pitler et. al, 2007). I found this particular process a bit more interactive and engaging for the students as they had to be more involved in research and data gathering as well as making predictions and charting different values in order to present a final unified graph.

While I do like these activities and see the value in their use I still feel the best type of constructionist activity is one the students define themselves. I like to allow students to create their own criteria based upon some agreed upon assessment parameter at the end of the process. The Orey video showed students creating booklets based upon novels they read. The booklets contained several artifacts that utilized different skills and talents to generate and one of the highlights for the students was creating poems that conformed to some shape they associated with their novel (Laureate Education, 2009). This allowed students to use word-processing programs to create a structure-poem. This group of exercises provides different kinds of activities that will help students learn better by tying in greater amounts of information and types of activities to the themes and content of their books. I've always been a fan of trying to tie different kinds of activities to learning so students who prefer one method over another have several ways to receive and associate information with their "boxes".

References:

Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). (2009). Program 7. Constructionist and Constructivist Learning Theories [Motion picture]. Bridging Learning Theory, Instruction, and Technology. Baltimore: Author.

Pitler, H., Hubbell, E., Kuhn, M., & Malenoski, K. (2007). Using technology with classroom instruction that works. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.