Thoughts on Chapter 9

Constructivism seems to be a highly controversial educational philosophy: at minimum, its methods are disputed amongst academics from traditional pedagogical backgrounds. For example, in my Instructional Systems Design class, I've found that the professor has a bit of disdain for it. Why is there this antipathy towards it? Two reasons off the top of my head. 1) I suspect that A type personalities need more structure and enumerated/clear goals. I find open ended generative activities are more productive than what ISD'ers want us to do: match a verb (from written objectives) to a specific generative activity. In addition, A types are not social beings, and constructivism's emphasis on social interaction as learning tool may make them feel uncomfortable. This could manifest itself at the instructor and/or learner levels. 2) For other teachers/professors, it may be a lack of time and resources to genuinely create a constructivist lesson(s). And related to my second point, teachers/professors may not know enough about constructivism to implement it.

I think this quote on page 195 summarizes the constructivist approach very well: "The aim of teaching, from a constructivist perspective, is not so much to transmit information as to encourage knowledge formation and metacognitive processes for judging, organizing, and acquiring new information" (Bruning, 195) Preach on brother! I really think that to survive in the 21st Century, a student needs to learn how to "judge, organize, and acquire new information" instead of learning "X" as if it were some magic quantity that labels him or her "proficient." Certainly there are skills that do have measured proficiency, but these are base skills that require automaticity (reading, writing, and math, for example). Once a decent level of automaticity is accomplished, the student will need to learn metacognitive skills and cognitive strategies so that information gathering and integration become automatic, too. And with constructivism's emphasis on the social aspect of learning, the learner acquires a certain automaticity in social interactions. I mentioned A types before: this kind of learning, although uncomfortable for them, could help broaden their social horizon and make awkward interactions normal.