What's wrong with Constructivism?

January 24, 2004

Ms. Frizzle has an interesting post called "Teaching Methods: Just going in circles?"

If you read Number2Pencil or Joanne Jacobs or ReformK12 regularly, as I do, you hear a lot of anti-constructivist, anti-ed-schools talk. They don't like the "new" (somewhere between 10-100 years or older) ways of teaching math and reading.

We can't speak for our esteemed colleagues, but what we don't like aren't new methods, it's methods that have been proven to be inferior to time-tested ones. Which isn't to say innovation isn't all bad, it's innovation for its own sake that we don't favor.

Constructivism is a great example of this. We posted on it a little while ago, noting that the benign form simply puts a new label on what effective teachers such as Ms. Frizzle have known for 4000 years.

Quite literally, teaching and learning are impossible if the learner doesn't construct meaning in his own brain about the topic at hand. Thus constructivism could refer to the construction of new neural pathways. None of this is news.

Where our objection arises is when Schools of Ed. pretend that they've discovered some amazing new phenomena, recommending that truly effective methods that have been used forever be abandoned, and that we now need to teach "using constructivism."

So concepts like teaching the long-division algorithm--and the cursed times tables--get tossed out the window, because the learner didn't construct these things himself, while "Invented Spelling" gets a pass, because that was. This "rabid" form of constructivism insists that teachers pretend that thousands of years of intellectual development never occurred, because what is important is the "discovery learning" aspect of constructivism.

Truly effective teachers know the difference. But freshly minted teachers might not. Which is why we're not big fans of most Schools of Ed, which play up the theory, but not the effective practice.

With regards to teaching factual knowledge, versus the more hands-on activities, Ms. Frizzle writes:

I try to combine the two approaches in my classroom. Certain skills must, eventually, be taught. Directly, explicitly, formally. But when kids figure something out for themselves, they are much less likely to forget it. And when they take their knowledge and DO something with it, they will probably NEVER forget it!

We heartily agree. But again, this isn't news, for the best teachers have always done just that. When educational theorists wrap an effective concept--especially one that teachers have long used--in a new mantle such as "Discovery Learning," they begin the process of divorcing it from reality.

Ms. Frizzle has good instincts. She needs to give herself more credit, and less to "new" theories such as Constructivism or Discovery Learning.

Teach on!

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Update: Jeff at So You Want to Be a Science Teacher has an excellent post supporting the teaching of constructivism. We're in complete agreement. We just don't like constructivism and discovery learning to displace rigor, which happens too frequently. If his training embraces rigor, training teachers to use a big bag of tricks--including constructivism and discovery learning--we are very pleased. (1/25/2004)