Musings on tools and construction...

Week 2 is down and I have spent the evening reading our required articles for class on Thursday. For the most part, I really got a lot out of the articles and the points the authors made. The biggest shift in thinking for me occured with the concept of constructivist learning and thinking about programs and features as more effective when they act as tools for organizing and analyzing information rather than information-distributors.

I think the constructivist model was and will continue to be such a shift for me because, like pretty much everyone else, I as a teacher am a product of how I was taught as a learner. It is easy to see why teachers rely on instructive strategies rather than constructive: the district gives you a set list of outcomes that the students must achieve, your grade-level or departmental team decides what skills/information must be attained, there is pressure from parents and administrators, and there is always the ever-looming presence of standardized tests. It seems much easier to just tell the kids what they need to know rather than allow them to construct the knowledge on their own. Also, many teachers become teachers because they were successful in school; that is, the instructive strategies used by their instructors worked for them. Thus, teachers think, "If it worked for me as a student, it should work for my students now." The idea of constructing knowledge seems much more powerful though. As the authors stated, it isn't just memorizing facts or regurgitating what the the student thinks the teacher wants to hear; it is a process where students engage in the material and assign it meaning based on their personal experiences and come to a deeper, more complex understanding of a concept or idea. I think my struggle will be with understanding how I can create a constructivist environment in my classroom while still adhering to guidelines and expectations set out by my district and building, especially when I don't have a lot of experience in constructivist classrooms.

I also really liked the idea of computer programs and features as tools for demonstrating and constructing knowledge rather than as distributors of pre-determined knowledge. The idea of students using a Hyper-Media Authoring System to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of a topic sounds very valuable, very useful, and very likely to rouse and sustain my students' interest. I need to finish reading this yet, but I'll probably comment more in the discussion area when I'm done.

That being said, I think I'm "thought out" for tonight. Till next week...