R7

Question: In their article, Airasian and Walsh outline cautions to take when trying to implement constructivism into classroom settings. Some of their argument was convincing to me, however, I also feel that constructivist classrooms can be very beneficial in certain situations. Since I am currently working at an elementary school, my question is how are younger children supposed to respond to constructivist teaching, since they may not see the importance of learning? For example, a current student that I am working with does not see the importance of reading, since his father told him that you do not have to be able to read to get a job.

Passage: “To convey one’s construction of meaning will require an in-depth presentation about
one’s knowledge and how one arrived at or justifies that knowledge. If constructions are reduced to multiple-choice items or to some other truncated representational form, the richness and meaning of constructivism will be lost” (Airasian and Walsh, 1997, p. 448).

Connection: One class that I took as a graduate student required that we write reflection papers weekly on our readings. In this class we also spent much of our class time in discussion of our views of the readings and wrote papers where the students developed the purpose of the paper. There were constructivist applications used in this class, since we were to build our own understandings of the material we were assigned. I had existing beliefs of my job as a school psychologist prior to the course, but I implemented the beliefs into my learning of new information, which is one way Airasian and Walsh described constructivism. I was able to gain knowledge in this particular course because I was educated enough to make legitimate associations with the readings in class to my prior knowledge and experience. This enabled me to remember a large portion of the material, since I could relate it to previous ideas. That being said, I do not believe that I would have benefited from using constructivism when I was in elementary school, because some concepts, like mathematics, would have been very difficult to construct my own knowledge without my teacher instructing me along the way. When I did attempt to “learn things on my own”, I failed to bring away the big picture of the particular topic.

Outside Connection: I couldn’t help but think of my brother after thinking about constructivism. In high school, he developed his own method of balancing equations in chemistry. It was an effective way, and he applied former knowledge learned in calculus to his creating of this method. It made sense to him, because his mind was a math machine. For example, he can look at any time on the clock and tell you the square root of that number within 10 seconds. I think it is great that he was able to learn the concept of balancing equations his own way, but what about the kids that don’t have the desire to learn the material? I think if I was told in high school that I could learn something however I wanted, I would respond by not being academically engaged.

After reading about constructivism in the classroom, I also thought about how it could be measured. In my career, I will be looking at students who are struggling and their responses to certain interventions. With schools moving towards Response to Intervention, it would be extremely difficult to implement constructivism. If a child is learning in their own way, then how can we tell if a concept is mastered or not?