In the last module, we saw a number of examples of constructivist learning environments and the effectiveness of these learning environments helping students to express critique and modify their ideas. In this module, I'd like to look at what are some of the challenges of implementing those constructivist learning environments. So I'd like to ask you to take a moment to write down what are some challenges that you see in implementing constructivist learning environments? So if you could enter your thoughts in the textbox and when we come back we'll look at some of these challenges. When I teach this class face to face, one of the papers that I have my students look at is the following paper by Mark Windschitl, and it's a long title and it's a long paper, "Framing constructivism in practice as the negotiation of dilemmas and analysis of the conceptual, pedagogical, cultural, and political challenges facing teachers." I remember when I first assigned this paper several years ago, I was really concerned. It's a rather long paper as you can see and it discusses a lot of fairly challenging ideas. But I was surprised at my student's reaction, they loved the paper and particularly practicing teachers often said it was the best paper that we had read all year. I think this was because while papers that we had been looking at the details of constructivist learning environments and the value of having students involved in those constructivist learning environments, teachers would often say well I live in the real world where these kinds of things are difficult and this paper really recognize those difficulties and didn't downplay them. But I realize that these are genuine dilemmas, genuine challenges. So I'd like to look at each of these conceptual, pedagogical, cultural, and political challenges and think about each of these. In the next two lectures I'd like to look at resources for facing these challenges. The first challenge is conceptual and here is Mark Windschitl talking about one of the conceptual issues or conceptual challenges in creating constructivist learning environments. Constructivism, I think it's interpreted by a lot of people as a completely wide-open class in which kids get to ask their own questions and state their own ideas. Well, I think over the last 20 years, constructivism has moved towards, "Yes we want to hear kids ideas all the time." However, we don't just throw open the gates and just have unfettered free form like non pedagogy. We actually have some very structured opportunities for students to talk about ideas. So here Mark Windschitl is talking about constructivism and some of the misperceptions of constructivism. In particular, the constructivism is simply letting kids do whatever they want to do, what he calls non pedagogy and it is definitely not this. So I'd like to look at some of the conceptual challenges. One is understanding constructivism as a perspective on learning not a teaching approach and so the non pedagogy is just let students do whatever they want. I think as we've been seeing, constructivism is more of a perspective on how do students develop ideas? What ideas do students come to instruction with and how can we help students to express critique and modify those ideas? Of course that perspective will have instructional implications. But constructivism is not simply a certain set of techniques. Understanding that constructivism is focused on ideas and idea based interaction not hands-on or discovery learning. There's a lot of hands-on learning in science classes. Lots of hands-on learning in math classes with manipulatives. But oftentimes these are dealt with not in a way that really helps students to engage with the ideas of the activities, but more as in science confirmatory labs that are very scripted. In mathematics, often having students play with manipulatives, but perhaps not asking questions that really help them to get at the underlying conceptual issues that the manipulatives can help them to deal with. So there are a number of misperceptions of constructivism. One that we already saw that constructivism is just letting kids do whatever they want. Another direct instruction has no place in the constructivist classroom. As we've discussed, telling is certainly something that can be a part of a constructivism classroom. Is just that as a constructivist, we would view that telling not as transmitting an idea to a student but rather as nudging them to think about something in their own ideas that they might not have thought about, they might not have access to before. Students must always be physically or socially active to learn. Oftentimes this is the case, they are socially interacting or they're working hands on with things. But there are also times when students are just quietly reflecting. They're mentally active but not necessarily physically or socially active. Another misperception is that all ideas conjectures and interpretations by students are equally legitimate. This is the view that whatever the students think is fine. Constructivism certainly says that we should value students ideas, but not that we should value them equally to the sophisticated ideas of mathematics and science that had been developed over the centuries. We certainly want to value students ideas and whether those ideas are ideas that they can build on or ideas that can impede their progress. But we want to evaluate students ideas and help them to express those ideas in a non-judgmental atmosphere and then to critique and modify those ideas were appropriate. As Mark continued to talk about, constructivism means having an unstructured classroom. It's definitely not the case. There are very different structures in constructivist learning environments. But there's very much structure there to help students again to express critique and modify their ideas. Finally, what version of constructivism are we talking about? We've been discussing constructivism so far as though it's a fairly unified idea and there are certainly a number of discussions of constructivism that fit very closely with what we've been talking about. But there are other discussions of constructivism that take more social orientations or even sociocultural perspectives and so looking at these three different orientations, we've been focusing on individual students ideas and idea based interactions in the social context of the classroom. Other perspectives on constructivism might focus predominantly on what goes on in the classroom, the social interactions and downplay or even ignore individual students ideas asking questions like, "How does the classroom come to a class consensus?" Sociocultural perspectives would tend to focus more on the larger culture of mathematics and science. What is the nature of mathematics? What is the nature of science? How can we help students to be apprenticed? It's often an apprenticeship metaphor. How can we help students to be apprenticed into the cultural practices of mathematics and science? So there are a number of different perspectives that we haven't dealt with in a lot of depths. But if you look in the literature, you'll often find different perspectives. Sometimes one perspective will downplay another perspective or even denigrate another perspective as not appropriate. My own personal view is that all of these dynamics are very important and all individual dynamics are embedded in the social dynamics of the classroom which are embedded in the sociocultural dynamics of the larger field. Other dilemmas. Another dilemma is a pedagogical dilemmas. Mark Windschitl here talks about some of the pedagogical dilemmas. So then there was pedagogical dilemmas that the teachers face, how do you explore students ideas? Let's say about solar eclipses. How do you entertain and get those out on the social plane in the classroom but still remain faithful by the end of the lesson or the unit to standard canonical science ideas? How do you allow students to construct and reconstruct explanations that have serious scientific laws to them? Do you provide a lecture where you give an authoritative lecture or about a scientific idea? That's one of the pedagogical dilemmas teachers states. So this is some of the pedagogical challenges. I think other pedagogical challenges are for example, honoring students attempts to think for themselves while remaining faithful to accepted disciplinary ideas. Again, we want to value student's ideas, but we also want to help them make sense of accepted disciplinary ideas, and not simply remain with their naive ideas. Developing a deeper knowledge of subject matter. Certainly as a teacher, in a constructivist learning environment, often calls on a deeper understanding of the subject matter. If you're simply lecturing to students, you can follow a nice prescribed path and you don't really have to divert off of that path very much. But if you're allowing students to express their ideas, to be involved in activities where puzzlements will come up that might be unexpected, then you need to be able to think on your feet. You need to have a pretty deep knowledge of the subject matter and be flexible in recognizing interesting possibilities in the interactions and activities that your students are having. Managing new kinds of discourse in collaborative work in the classroom. Now certainly, one aspect of many constructivist learning environments is having students work in small groups. It's not simply a matter of okay, well let's just break students up into groups and have them do stuff. What is the kind of stuff that you want to have them do? How can you organize the work so that they're genuinely discussing ideas and not simply working separately and a divide and conquer? What do you do as a teacher, walking around as you interact with these small groups? So there are a lot of details that are very important in thinking about how to manage new kinds of discourse and collaborative work in the classroom. So I think this raises a number of questions. What does it mean to become a facilitator of learning? What skills and strategies are necessary? How do I manage a classroom where students are talking to one another rather than to me? Should I place limits on students construction of their own ideas? So these are just some of the detailed pedagogical challenges that one faces in trying to implement constructivist learning environments. Another challenge is cultural challenges or cultural dilemmas, and here Mark Windschitl talks about some of those. There are some cultural dilemmas to constructivism. I was talking earlier about the increasing diversity in classrooms, and I was also talking about sense-making talk that you want to engender, multiple times over the course of a lesson. But children come in from various backgrounds and they come from schooling systems that do not value sometimes. A lot of students talk. Students who've come from some other countries grew up in a colonial system of education, where the teacher's role is simply to, almost literally, write on the board. Their role is simply to take notes. For the teacher then to then ask them, "So tell me what you think about force and motion on a playground slide?" That seems very uncomfortable for some students. It's not their position to say what they think they know, because it's not coming from the teacher. That's just one of a number of different cultural dilemmas that teachers face in the classroom. Students and parents expect schooling to be the way that they've always experienced it, which is typically very transmissionist. The teacher telling the students what to learn, the students taking notes, learning it, repeating that back on tests etc. So when constructivist learning environments differ or deviate from these expectations, then these are definitely cultural challenges. So how can the teacher help students to understand these new arrangements? So a focus on training to give right answers is what students and parents expect, and students and parents views of teaching will be strongly influenced by the conduit metaphor. This raises a number of questions. So for example, how can we contradict traditional efficient classroom routines and generate new agreements with students, about what is valued and rewarded? How can we help students to make sense of why they're working in small groups? Why they're trying to answer questions that the teacher hasn't given them an answer to already etc? How do my own past images of what is proper and possible in a classroom prevent me from seeing the potential for different kind of learning environment? As as teachers, we've had lots of experiences, mostly in traditional classrooms, where traditional norms of the teacher gives the information, the students learn that information, and then give that information back on tests. So these are the images that we have and how can we develop new images of what is possible in a classroom? How can I accommodate the worldviews of students from diverse backgrounds while at the same time transforming my own classroom culture? So as Mark talked about, many students from different cultures have an even stronger expectation of a very directive classroom. So how can we help students to make sense of these new possibilities? Can I trust students to accept responsibility for their own learning? If I give them a little bit of freedom, they're are going to abuse that freedom and can I trust them to not abuse that freedom? So these are some very genuine questions. The final challenge that Mark Windschitl talks about are political challenges or political dilemmas. One of the strongest issues that comes up in talking with teachers is the issue of time. Here, James Minstrell will talk about that issue of time and what he has found to be helpful in dealing with the issue of a limited amount of time. The big one that I hear from teachers is time. "I don't have time to teach like this." My suggestion for them is to think in terms of the unit, however much time you're thinking that you have for that unit. I know the colleague next door said, "I'll give you two weeks of time for this unit." So what can I do in that two weeks? There's a tendency for teachers to put a very little time on the development of ideas a lot of time on the application of the ideas. But one of the pushes that I have is to think about the development of ideas in a very deep way and give time to that. So it might end up being in your two week unit, rather than one day, on presenting the ideas and now go apply the ideas for 90 days, and try to verification at labs and that sort of thing. Neither is thinking about half of those days, maybe five of the days, to actually develop the ideas. Anther political challenge is that of standardized tests. Here, Mark Windschitl talks about standardized tests and the importance not just of doing something different in your own classroom, but of working to try to effect the political system by going up in the system to where those decisions are made. This is where a teacher, herself or himself, cannot fight the entire system. They have to join with other teachers. This is almost like a political dilemma from my 2002 paper. This is a political dilemma because you have to work your way up the system and talk to principals and district leaders about the ways in which standardized testing are going to be used to actually judge the worth of what's going on in schools. You have to work your way all the way up to state boards of education. Because they're the ones who control the regents exam. I don't want to pick on New York, but every state has got some high pressure exam that is by its nature, because it's widely distributed, it's probably multiple choice. Is that the way we want to go? People talk about 21st century skills being something that everybody in every state says, "We got to have our kids understand 21st century skills." But guess what's in those skills? Is problem-solving being creative about problem solving and then working with others to do that? Two of the core features of a constructivist environment. So just to think about more about these political challenges, administrators, parents, and other stakeholders may not share a constructivist perspective on learning. So if they're view of a good classroom is the one where students sit orderly in rows and listen to the teacher, then if students are in small groups talking with each other and the classroom is noisier than usual, then these can be issues that you will need to educate administrators and parents on why you're doing things the way that you're doing them. Accountability systems such as tests teacher evaluations etc likely value training students to give correct responses, rather than learning for understanding. Again, these are things that it may require going beyond what happens in the classroom to try to change the system in organizing with other teachers and others who value student understanding. So some questions are, how can I gain the support of administration and parents for teaching in such a radically different and unfamiliar way? Should I make use of approved curriculum that are not sensitive enough to my students needs or should I create my own? How can diverse problem-based experiences and help students meet specific state and local standards? Will constructivist learning environments, adequately prepare my students for high-stakes testing for college admissions? So these are all very difficult challenges that the teachers face in trying to implement constructivist learning environments. I won't be able to give easy answers to these challenges. In fact, no one is able to give easy answers to these challenges. So rather than try to do that, what I'm going to do in the next two lectures is to talk about some resources that you can use in order to try to deal with these challenges in your particular context.
