Constructivism in Practice

I am somewhat discouraged as I begin this blog post.  Last year I taught eighth grade in a sixty day rotation, with five teaching classes and one seminar class per day. During seminar students went to teachers as needed.  Today I teach grades six-eight in a thirty day rotation with no seminars, which means if students need help in my class they either come before or after school.  This change caused some of the cognitive and constructionist learning activities that are involved in this week’s resources to be eliminated.  Two important activities that need to be reinstated in my classes are WebQuests and an Excel activity.

I feel that good essential questions can lend to students creating and testing hypotheses.  I am very fortunate that I am able to involve all six tasks that help students generate and test hypotheses in my seventh and eighth grade classes.  They are, system analysis, problem solving, historical investigation, invention, experimental inquiry and decision making (Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn, & Malenoski, 2007, p. 203).  Of those of you that are familiar with my classes you might be questioning historical investigation.  As students research other student’s projects they find that design changes involve trade-offs in design that affect the outcome.  There are different designs that produce the same solution, thus there is no agreed-upon resolution (Pitler et al., 2007, p. 203).

My classes are designed around problem-based learning, which involves cognitive and constructionist learning activities.  They involve some of the common characteristics in problem-based inquiry instructional models which are:

·         The activity is grounded in a general question about a problem that has multiple possible answers and methods of addressing the question

·         Learning is student-centered; the teacher acts as facilitator

·         Students work collaboratively toward addressing the general question

·         Learning is driven by the context of the problem and is not bound by an established curriculum  (Orey, 2011)

The students have the opportunity to work both individually and in groups when constructing their projects.  The basic steps are research, collaborate, design, construct, test and collect data, review data and decide if criteria were met. 

One of the first activities that were used in the past when transitioning from teacher to facilitator was a WebQuest.  The WebQuests involved open-ended questions that had multiple viewpoints or solutions as mentioned by Dr. Orey (Orey, 2011).  I basically addressed the essential questions and supplied multiple links on the internet where various answers could be located.  This is where the students took over the project.  Presently, students start researching at a class wiki where links and other information is provided.

Another activity used in the past was an Excel sheet.  We created one Excel sheet for the class.  Students entered data collected upon the completion of their project.  I pushed the buttons to create the graph.  We did not write hypotheses, however, the graph did show if the decisions they made were correct.  In the future I will ask them to write a hypothesis.  I realize our text states an Excel activity could be too much for classes (Pitler et al., 2007, p. 204); however, if a teacher is able to incorporate data into one Excel sheet it might be workable. 

 

I am presently reviewing my lessons for next year, looking for ways to modify and incorporate these two important activities that involve cognitive and constructionist learning.  Currently we are striving the last few days of each rotation to complete the project.

References

Orey, M. (2011). Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology. Retrieved from http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/index.php?title=Main_Page

Pitler, H., Hubbell, E. R., Kuhn, M., & Malenoski, K. (2007). Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works. Denver, Co.: Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning.