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Have you in your own education, your children’s education, or in a school you’ve taught at experienced a constructivist approach to education? If so, describe some of the impact (positive or negative) you experienced/witnessed.
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Yes! We love it. The Constructivist theory suggests that much of what we are experiencing we’ve never run into before … so folks need to create the new technology or idea. There are skills, mindsets, and perspectives to embrace! It’ll be amazing when Christians are involved (rather than avoiding), playing integral parts, to the development of new technologies.
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Yes I have taught students to use constructivist. After we complete each unit of history, the students are to use their imagination on developing a story, poster, collage or a book presenting some of the topic covered in the unit. Is a positive environment.
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I used it with small group centers, and it works well if you are VERY organized. It is a very tricky thing. You have to have very engaging activities that can be completed independently.
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I’ve used this in Kindergarten with learning centers. It went well with some students and other students had trouble changing to a different center or did not want to do what the center asked for.
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I did take a piece of constructivism when I homeschooled, in that, I allowed my daughter to choose a couple of her novels to read that year. (However, I did choose some of the others that she would read). We were pretty flexible in Science at the elementary level, so I allowed them to choose which projects they wanted to do experiments with. The positive was that they were more interested in those subject areas when they had some choice. I can’t say that I really noticed any negatives, as there was always some structure involved. We stuck to a Traditional/Process Mastery approach, but there were more opportunities for constructivist elements too. I can see where if constructivism is the primary way, where things could definitely become less structured and too egocentric.
