Constructivism, Behavioral theory and ... some soup.

When I teach my Junior English class, one of my favorite units is something I call the "isms". We go over the ideas of Classicism, Romanticism, Transcendentalism and Gothicism. My students often groan good-naturedly when I bring up the isms because I enjoy this part of the curriculum so much and we review a good deal of work from these various genres.

In many ways, teachers can look at learning theory as the 'isms' of teaching. We have behavioral theory... or "mouse in a maze-ism" where we reward students for proper behavior and repetition of a task or concept. We may also withhold reward or even provide punishment to students based upon their performance. Mouse in a maze-ism can basically be boiled down to the idea that students LIKE consistency in how they are taught and they LIKE to consistently produce work that pleases their teacher and subsequently provides them with cheesy-good grades. From a technology standpoint, a number of standard tools and technologies that students can learn and rely upon help them to develop a solid reliable relationship with their learning. For example, learning a word-processing tool like Word is generally very reinforcing, because the student is able to learn the various controls and reproduce reliably some work that will provide them with rewards.

One of the other ism's that teachers use more and more of is constructivism. This is a strategy that asks students to create some new and exciting artifact that they can show to others. An artifact could be an oral presentation, a movie, a webpage - even a rock that is painted nicely. the idea is that a student works to create something new by aggregating and synthesizing material into something unique and personal. I like to think of this as "build a better mouse-trapism". (Actually, I prefer constructivism to behavioral methods so the whole mousetrap catching the mouse in the maze is appropriate... sort of.)

There are other learning theory components that tie in to both of these major theories. Dr. Orey has suggested that people learn by classifying items, placing them in little mental boxes and then finding ways to associate all the different boxes in our minds (Laureate Education, 2007). This concept ties in more or less with some of the tenets of behavioral theory. The goal is to help students not only create these "boxes" in their minds but through repetition and personalized episodes help them create numerous links to those boxes so they can find the memory and reproduce it whenever needed.

Another sub-concept of constructivism is the idea of collaboratively working on some artifact. This brings several students together working on some project or deliverable and puts them into a social environment where they not only learn from the material presented but from eachother as well. Environmental theories suggest that students learn from the environment, people and situations around them. Therefore, teachers can combine better mouse-trap-ism with collaborative concepts to maximize the rewards of constructivism and social learning.

references:

Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). (2009). Program 4. Cognitive 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.