Constructivist Teacher and Changes

Things to share for me and for you.

Tips in becoming a Constructivist teacher

1. Constructivist Teachers encourage and accept student autonomy and initiative
2. Constructivist Teachers use raw data and primary sources, along with manipulative, interactive, and physical materials.
3. When framing tasks, Constructivist Teachers use cognitive terminology such as 'classify', 'analyze', 'predict', and 'create'.
4. Constructivist Teachers allow student responses to drive lessons, shift instructional strategies, and alter content.
5. Constructivist Teachers inquire about students' understandings of concepts before sharing their own understandings of those concepts.
6. Constructivist Teachers encourage students to engage in dialogue, both with the teacher and with one another.
7. Constructivist Teachers encourage student inquiry by asking thoughtful, open-ended questions, and encouraging students to ask questions of each other.
8. Constructivist Teachers seek elaboration of students' initial responses.
9. Constructivist Teachers engage students in experiences that might engender contradictions to their initial hypotheses and then encourage discussion.
10. Constructivist Teachers allow wait time after posing questions.
11. Constructivist Teachers provide time for students to construct relationships and create metaphors.
12. Constructivist Teachers nurture students' natural curiosity through frequent use of the learning cycle model.

These 12 descriptors highlight teacher practices that help students search for their own understandings rather than follow other people's logic. These descriptors can serve as guides that may help other educators forge personal interpretations of what it means to become a constructivist teacher.

reference:
In search of understanding; The Case For Constructivist Classrooms
Jacqueline Grennon Brooks; Martin G.Brooks


Bold Actions and Changes

1) Structure pre-service and in-service teacher education around constructivist principles and practices.
2) Re-structuring the assessment procedures that meaningful for students.
3) Focus resources more on teachers' professional development than on text books and workbooks.
4) Eliminate letter and number grades.
5) Form school-based study groups focused on human developmental principles.
6) Require annual seminars on teaching and learning for administrators and school board members.


Conclusion

What is School? and Schooling?
= listening to teachers and taking notes
= taking tests
= lugging text books from class to class
= writing book reports
= standing in straight lines
= seeking permission to visit the restrooms
= etc?

These are the images, practices, and expectations, upon which schooling has been structured since the very first common schools were erected well over a century ago. The images are more to 'control' rather than 'learning'?

New Images? 
- that reflect:-


= students as a thinker
= students as a creator
= students as a constructor
= students are encourage to develop hupotheses, to test their own and others' ideas
= students to make connections among 'content' areas,
= students to explore issues and problems of personal relevance
= students to work cooperatively with peers and adults in the pursuit of understandings
= students and adults to form the disposition to be life long learners


The old images of school do not speak directly to the central issue of school reform-ways to evoke student learning through their search for understanding. The images of Constructivism do.