Constructivist Teaching Methods - Constructivism For Adults

Constructivism For Adults

Constructivist philosophy has a long history of application in education programs for young children, but is used less frequently in adult learning environments. As humans develop, there are qualitative changes in their ability to think logically about experiences, but the processes by which learning occur, cognitive adaptation and social mediation, are believed to be continuous or remain the same throughout the life. At the heart of constructivist philosophy is the belief that knowledge is not given but gained through real experiences that have purpose and meaning to the learner, and the exchange of perspectives about the experience with others (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969; Vygotsky,1978).

Learning environments for adults based on constructivist philosophy include opportunities for students to make meaningful connections between new material and previous experience, through discovery. One of the simplest ways to do this is asking open-ended questions. Open-ended questions such as “Tell me about a time when….” or “How might this information be useful to you?” causes learners to think about how new information may relate to their own experience. Student responses to such questions are opportunities for experiencing the perspectives of others. For these questions to be effective it is critical that instructors focus on teaching content that is useful for participants. The importance of using these types of strategies with adults contributes to what Bain(2004 p. 4) noted as critical learning environments where instructors “embed” the skills they are teaching in “authentic tasks that will arouse curiosity, challenge students to rethink assumptions and examine their mental modes of reality”. Mezirow J. (1997) who asserts that learners need to practice in recognizing frames of reference and using their imaginations to redefine problems from different perspectives. (pg. 10) I made the connection by also adding the point that “to promote discovery learning, the educator often reframes learner questions in terms of the learner’s current level of understanding. Learning contracts, group projects, role play, case studies, and simulations are classroom methods associated with transformative education.” Such approaches emphasize that learning is not an "all or nothing" process but that students learn the new information that is presented to them by building upon knowledge that they already possess. It is therefore important that teachers constantly assess the knowledge their students have gained to make sure that the students' perceptions of the new knowledge are what the teacher had intended. Teachers will find that since the students build upon already existing knowledge, when they are called upon to retrieve the new information, they may make errors. It is known as reconstruction error when we fill in the gaps of our understanding with logical, though incorrect, thoughts. Teachers need to catch and try to correct these errors, though it is inevitable that some reconstruction error will continue to occur because of our innate retrieval limitations.

In most pedagogies based on constructivism, the teacher's role is not only to observe and assess but to also engage with the students while they are completing activities, wondering aloud and posing questions to the students for promotion of reasoning (DeVries et al., 2002). (ex: I wonder why the water does not spill over the edge of the full cup?) Teachers also intervene when there are conflicts that arise; however, they simply facilitate the students' resolutions and self-regulation, with an emphasis on the conflict being the students' and that they must figure things out for themselves. For example, promotion of literacy is accomplished by integrating the need to read and write throughout individual activities within print-rich classrooms. The teacher, after reading a story, encourages the students to write or draw stories of their own, or by having the students reenact a story that they may know well, both activities encourage the students to conceive themselves as reader and writers.