This page is provided ahead of the lecture:
Seven slogans for constructivist teachers: key ideas for teaching in accordance with learning theory
Given to the UTM Faculty of of Social Sciences and Humanities on 22nd March 2021
This page is intended to get you thinking about some of the issues to be discussed in the lecture…
The lecture discusses what a constructivist perspective on learning (as presented in the previous lecture) suggests for how we should teach. The lecture highlights seven features of teaching that respond to what we understand about the nature of learning. In the lecture, I tag each of these ideas with a label in the form of a slogan, motto or maxim – something that I hope will be memorable, and help keep the essence of the key idea in mind.
You can find the lecture here.
These seven slogans are:
- 'be a tour guide, not a road map'
- 'drip-feed reinforcement'
- 'find the optimum level of simplification'
- 'identify learning quanta at the learners' resolution'
- 'make the unfamiliar, familiar'
- 'mediate challenge with support'
- 'share the learner's starting point'
Effective teaching needs to take into account what we understand about learning. The constructivist perspective tell us that learning is incremental (that learning occurs through modest steps or learning quanta), interpretive (learners make sense of the new in terms of the familiar), and iterative (as teaching is interpreted in terms of existing understanding, current ways of thinking channel how new material is understood). Working memory, the location of conscious thinking, is known to be very limited *. New memories are initially quite 'fragile', and not easily brought to mind, until they become well-integrated within a network / web of established ideas, and so more robust – and more readily brought to mind.
Pre-lecture activity
In this preview, I offer brief outlines of each of the key ideas that these slogans are intended to represent. However, they are not necessarily in the order listed above. Your task is to read through the brief summaries, and see if you can work out which slogan is intended to be associated with that idea. In each case, please vote for the slogan that you think best reflects the idea or principle outlined. As these ideas are linked (so there is some overlap), you might want to have a quick read of each description before making your assignments.
If you 'attend'/view the lecture you can find out whether your assignments match mine.
Tapping into the learner's interpretive repertoire
Teaching involves introducing learners to skills, knowledge, ideas, or ways of thinking, that will be new to them. When teaching abstract concept material the teacher does not have the option of pointing at the thing to be learnt (say price elasticity of demand, aromaticity, alleles, or hysteresis). The constructivist perspective tell us that people can only make good sense of complex new material if they can relate it to something that they already understand or have experience of. Where teaching is not experienced as meaningful, it will not be understood (and will probably not be remembered either).
However, we also know that each person comes to class with a vast repertoire of resources for interpreting their experiences (including teaching) – all the images and ideas and facts and so forth they have built up. The teacher can therefore seek to find suitable points to 'anchor' new ideas in a learner's existing thinking by showing that what is being presented is in some way similar to something that the learner does already know about. This may involve finding examples and applications related to students' interests, or the use of metaphors and similes and analogies.
Follow the curriculum or lead the learners?
Often a teacher is given strong guidance on what to teach. There is usually a curriculum specification or teaching scheme or similar document which sets out the target knowledge – where students are meant to get to by the end of the term/semester/course. This is usually based on an assumption that the students in the class/programme have already met and mastered certain background. It is assumed, for example, that students starting year/grade 9 will have already learnt the target knowledge set out for students in year/grade 8.
Yet, in reality, there will be students in the class where that is not entirely true. Perhaps they missed some classes, or a previous teacher did not finish teaching all the prescribed topics, or the students were not paying attention at some point, or they did not understand the teaching – or perhaps they understood it at the time, but do not seem to remember it at all now. As learning is iterative, once students miss or misunderstand something, that can then impede learning from subsequent teaching, so compounding matters. In my experience that will be true to some extent at least of most learners in most classes – even at post-graduate level – and some students may be missing quite a lot of essential background (or 'pre-requisite' learning).
A teacher therefore has a choice. The teacher can be progamme-led or student-led. The teacher can decide to follow the prescribed teaching scheme as it is written, and make sure they present all the required material, and get to the end of the programme so know they have 'taught' everything as specified (regardless of how well it might be understood). Alternatively, the teacher can assess the learners' existing levels of knowledge and understanding, and use that as a basis for building towards target knowledge, even if that means spending precious class time teaching material that the students should ideally already have mastered. This may make it difficult to cover (from the teacher's viewpoint) all the expected material in detail, but (from the learner's viewpoint) may actually progress student learning much further.
Keeping learners on the right path
A good teacher offers a clear, accurate, and carefully structured exposition of subject matter. This requires a careful analysis of the logic of the topic. The teacher's presentation builds up ideas logically towards target knowledge. Any student who
- is always present
- always paying attention,
- has a strong background knowledge with a canonical understanding of underpinning concepts and key terminology,
- makes the expected connections,
- makes good notes in class, and
- effectively revises their notes frequently and regularly,
has a good chance of following the teacher's arguments over the course and so achieving target understanding.
But most pupils will sometimes
- miss things,
- lose concentration,
- misunderstand,
- interpret some ideas in terms of alternative conceptions,
- fail to spot some intended connections,
- make their own unhelpful associations,
- make incomplete, inaccurate or illegible notes,
and so forth. Even when students seem to be understanding, they may not be understanding as intended: people are very good at making sense of material, but not always in the ways intended.
It is not enough therefore for the teacher to simply set out a logical path towards target knowledge as students will from time to time go astray – they will take wrong turnings, and sometimes find themselves in cul-de-sacs; they will sometimes become distracted by the scenery along the journey and dawdle, only to find they have then lost sight of the next stage. The teacher therefore needs to teach in a conversational way that uses dialogue as a tool for ongoing formative assessment, helping learners to understand the landmarks along the route; and keep nudging the students back on track towards the destination.
See subject matter like a novice
As suggested above, effective teaching of abstract topics requires a careful analysis of the subject matter to identify the key concepts and how they relate to each other, and to find logical routes through the material. The teacher, as a subject expert is well-placed to do that.
We know that the capacity of working memory, where we do our conscious thinking, is very limited – that is we can only mentipulate a very small number of items in the mind at once. However, there is no absolute measure of what counts as one item in this regard. The expert has deep and broad subject knowledge, that is well established and highly integrated (inter-linked). So when we are thinking about domains where we have great expertise (be that nuclear physics, Manchester United football club, or Korean pop music)Â we access material from memory already 'chunked' into extensive units. Someone who is new to the same material may experience it as an array of different items, each of which would take up separate capacity in working memory.
This is a challenge for the teacher, as disciplinary material looks quite different to the novice than to the expert. Someone who is new to material sees it as much more complex and disjointed than someone who has already mastered it. What fits readily in the expert mind,will often overwhelm the novice. (Whatever the topic: you may not follow the students' account of Korean pop music any more than they follow your exposition of nuclear physics.)
Teachers therefore have the task of both understanding subject matter as experts, but also being able to adopt the viewpoint of the uninitiated. They have to both master their subject, and learn to stand back and see how it appears at a very different scale.
Developing 'intellectually honest' teaching models
In most disciplinary fields the current state of knowledge is subtle and complex, having evolved over a period of time from the contributions of many experts both challenging and building upon each others' work. Sensibly, in curriculum design and development, curricular models are developed which simplify the current state of knowledge and set out target knowledge that is considered accessible for learners at a particular grade or level. Often a teacher will decide that even these curricular models are, initially at least, too convoluted or abstract to be fully accessible to their students, and the teacher will use a teaching model which simplifies the subject matter further. Such simplifications are both sensible and often necessary if we are not to 'teach over the heads' of learners, and so frustrate them with material that does not make good sense to them.
However, by their very nature, models are not perfect reflections of what is being modelled – they miss things out, or emphasise some aspects and play down others. Indeed some models may so reduce the original subject matter that they no longer bear any strong relationship with it – we might say they lose the essence of what is to be studied. So, some simplifications may make material accessible to learners can be misleading in ways that actually impede later progression towards more sophisticated understanding. They fail to be (to use a term of the educational thinker Jerome Bruner) 'intellectually honest'.Â
One of the challenges in teaching is finding simplifications which are sufficiently pared down – stripped of secondary complications – to make good sense to learners whilst still imparting the core essence of the key idea, and so acting as suitable foundations for later learning that can build back in some of the complexity and nuance that is lost in the model.
Setting learning activities in the construction zone
A central challenge to a teacher is pitching work at the right level. This is especially difficult given that in class teaching it is inevitable that students will vary along all kinds of dimensions, so that what is too difficult for one student is trivial for another. Learning activities that students can readily succeed at can sometimes be useful in increasing accuracy and fluency or speed, but do not offer much scope for substantive learner development towards genuinely new capacities. Teaching that is 'educative', that genuinely helps students develop new understanding or skills, has to take them out of their comfort zone and make them stretch beyond their current levels of competence. That, is working within what Vygotsky called the zone of next development (or the zone of proximal development).
Yet asking students to undertake something where they do not already have mastery of the necessary understanding or skills can be frustrating, and so demotivating. This is especially so if previous educational experience has seldom asked learners to engage (and initially maybe struggle) with a task or problem intensively allowing them to come to appreciate how that experience can ultimately offer real insight and satisfaction, and be very fruitful.
Ideally, the teacher sets tasks which it is known students are not yet quite ready to tackle alone, but also has planned various means of offering support to mediate the difficulties of the task – support that can be slowly withdrawn as it is no longer needed. (That is, what Vygotsky called fading 'scaffolding'.) Given that each learner in a class is unique, the support available needs to be differentiated so that different students can access different levels of support.
Revisiting fragile learning to make it robust
In everyday life we sometimes talk about memory and forgetting as if these are binary operations: something is remembered or not. Yet we know this is actually much more complicated. For one thing even if a student initially represents some new learning in memory, this will initially be only loosely linked into the wider network of ideas that person has acquired.
One can think of memory as working a bit like an organisation with an overstretched post room. When a new letter arrives it is opened and stamped with the date of receipt and added to a large pile of incoming post so that if someone in the organisation wants to check for such a letter they can come and go through the pile and see if they can find it. If they do, they will take it away to the appropriate department – otherwise it will remain in the ever-deepening post pile. If the post rooms starts receiving reminders asking for responses to an earlier letter they will then prioritise these messages, seek out the original letter, and pass the correspondence along to the appropriate section. Letters that are not are not actively expected and sought out by other departments, and which are not followed-up with reminders, tend to get lost in the system due to the frequent arrival of new post.
Some students will review their notes after each class, and then at regular interviews,seeking to actively process the material by seeing how it links with other learning, and will look to re-represent the material by writing summaries and drawing concept maps and the like. They are like the organisation employee who actively goes into the post room to search out pertinent letters. Commonly, however, new learning will become swamped with all the other incoming experiences, unless the teacher sends regular reminders. Teachers need to support the consolidation of learning, by revisiting new ideas, concepts, principles, technical terms, definitions, etc., whenever relevant to reinforce the learning – taking every opportunity to remind students, and to invite them to use the new learning and take ownership of it, by pointing out any examples; and relating it to other topics and subjects whenever relevant to help build up associations .
I hope you found that activity useful 'food for thought'.
* A question about an image:
Consider this image:
Imagine you wanted to describe (in words) this image to someone who had never seen it before so that they could visualise it (in their 'mind's eye').
What is the minimal amount of information you would need to provide for them to picture the image accurately. If they wanted to remember your description so they could draw the image later, how many pieces of information would they need to 'keep in mind' or recall later to get the detail right?
What if the person you were communicating with was an adult friend who was a long-time resident of Malaysia. Would the task become easier? How many pieces of information would they have to keep in mind to later reproduce the image?
