I think what Glasersfeld meant by constructing knowledge is to take in what you hear and see through your own lens of experience and calling that knowledge. A teacher may try to teach a certain subject, but the student may not interpret what is being taught the way the teacher meant it to be. The student constructs their own knowledge based on their own experiences. It is not acquiring knowledge since it is not the information being presented is never quite the same as what is actually being stored in the brain.
If I believed in constructivism, I would teach in a way to rigorously interpret the understanding of my students. If they are all taking in information in different ways, I want to know how much of that is correct or incorrect. I will do this though frequent quizzes, homework assignments, and class activities to see what is really being understood correctly by my students. Possibly it would be wise to have a couple of student-teacher interviews each year so that I might talk with my students one-on-one to see how they are interpreting what is being taught.
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I totally agree with your idea of constructivism; that's exactly what I understood it to mean too. Not so much of a lecture or passive perception, but more of experience and reasoning through things.
ReplyDeleteAnd how you would teach seemed new to me. I hadn't thought of holding student-teacher sessions. But that would certainly be an excellent way to find out what the student knows and doesn't know. Though that wouldn't be a very practical thing for anything outside of elementary school. What might be a good way of getting the same result when teaching a hundred students?
Constructing knowledge is not something that you can choose to do, or not do. You are constructing knowledge whether you actively listen and interpret lecture, or you are talking to neighbor. Constructivism happens all the time, whether we want it to or not, because we interpret everything based on our past experiences. We can't see things any other way.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your ideas of giving homework assignments and quizzes to know if students are really understanding what is being taught. I think it is also important to recognize that because students learn from their experiences they will all interpret the material differently. One student might learn fractions better from an iterating perspective and another from partitioning.
ReplyDeleteI thought you had a good idea about constructivism, and how this would effect your teaching style if you believed in it. However, constructivism is happening every second of every minute of the day. As we have experiences, even having the experience of falling asleep in a math class, it effects the way we perceive the world around us, and it affects our knowledge. Thanks for your insights though; I thought they were very good.
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