Ten dollar words

Million dollar outcomes

23 July 2024

Image credit Colleen Farris

Recently, I road tested some fundamental educational concepts: constructivism and constructionism; TPACK and critical constructivism; and design process thinking. The terms for these concepts are the epitome of “ten dollar words''--words a person on the street probably would not know. This type of educationese makes my eyes glaze over. What do these terms mean anyway? 

In layman’s terms, constructivism is the theory that individual learners create knowledge within their specific social contexts (Alanazi, 2016). Constructionism grew out of constructivism. Key characteristics of teaching and learning based on these concepts are personalized, experiential learning, or to use more common terms, questioning and making.

Constructivism is a theory of how knowledge is created (Bransford, 2000, p.11). It is not a new idea. In fact, it can be traced back in European educational thought at least 300 years to the founder of kindergarten, Frederich Froebel, through to the twentieth century and on to more familiar names including Montessori, and Piaget. Constructionism is a theory of pedagogy that grew out of constructivism, as it was defined by Papert, a student of Piaget’s. The maker movement is closely associated with Papert’s ideas about constructing knowledge by having students make meaningful objects (Halverson and Sheridan, 2014).

What is so great about the constructivist and constructionist approaches to teaching and learning? According to How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition (Bransford, 2000), they help us focus on the knowledge creation process, and create learning experiences that enable students to transfer knowledge. The ability to transfer knowledge means that students not only know facts, they also know how to apply those facts to solve real world problems. In my opinion, that is the goal of education.

How does one go about creating a learning experience based on these ideas? There are some important concepts and thinking tools to assist this process. Critical constructivism highlights the influence power and social structures have on teaching, learning, and knowledge creation. In particular, critical constructivism states that teaching, learning, and knowledge creation are interconnected, while also being determined by the context in which they occur. Explicit acknowledgement of the nature of this context is essential to pedagogical practice (Coghlan and Brydon-Miller, 2014).

Koehler and Mishra’s (2008) TPACK concept unpacks the interrelatedness of teaching and learning by graphically representing the overlap of technological, pedagogical (teaching practice) and content knowledge within the learning context (Koehler, 2017). It provides a visual and conceptual framework for thinking about and designing learning. 

TPACK guides instruction design for a given context that arises from the intersections of a teacher’s content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and application of appropriate technological knowledge and tools. Utilizing this framework should prevent technological tools from being imposed on the teaching and learning process without regard for their suitability to the content of a lesson and the pedagogical approach being used to teach that lesson.

Best practices for the lesson design process can be drawn from Stanford University’s design thinking process: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test (Shanks, n.d.). In the first phase, teachers detect the needs of their students by watching, listening, and asking questions. In the second phase, teachers process the information gathered during the empathy step to define the problem that needs to be addressed through lesson design. 

After taking in information during the first two phases, the third phase requires teachers to generate a variety of ideas about how to address the problem. Then, in the fourth phase, ideas are made into models that can be tested. The fifth phase involves testing these  prototypes, and collecting data and feedback; however, the design process does not stop there. Lesson design is a recursive process. Refinements may require moving through and within the phases for multiple iterations to achieve the desired result.

They may be a mouthful to say, but constructivism, constructionism, TPACK, critical constructivism, and the design thinking process make a powerful educational toolbox. At the beginning of this post, I mentioned that I tested these ideas. You can read about my lesson prototype and the results here, but I will give you a sneak peak at the results. Incorporating all these concepts, along with inspiration from Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question (discussed here), was a success. Those ten dollar words yielded million dollar outcomes: increased learner confidence, increased learner knowledge, and engagement levels through the roof! Click on the links to learn more.

References

Alanazi, Ahmed. “A Critical Review of Constructivist Theory and the Emergence of Constructionism”. American Research Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Volume 2, pp:1-8. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ahmed-Alsayer/publication/331627180_A_Critical_Review_of_Constructivist_Theory_and_the_Emergence_of_Constructionism/links/5c831d99458515831f92de1d/A-Critical-Review-of-Constructivist-Theory-and-the-Emergence-of-Constructionism.pdf.

Berger, W. (2024). A more beautiful question: The power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas. Bloomsbury.

Coghlan, D., & Brydon-Miller, M. (2014). Critical constructivism. In The SAGE Encyclopedia of Action Research (Vol. 2, pp. 204-206). SAGE Publications Ltd, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446294406. 

Halverson ER, Sheridan KM. The maker movement in education. Harvard Educational Review. 2014///Winter;84(4):495-504,563,565. https://nuigalway.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/maker-movement-education/docview/1642662200/se-2.

Koehler, M. (2017, June 9). TPACK explained. TPACK.ORG. https://matt-koehler.com/tpack2/tpack-explained/.

Koehler, M. J., & Mishra, P. (2008). Introducing TPCK. In AACTE Committee on Innovation and Technology (Eds.) Handbook of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK) for Educators (pp. 3-30). Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

National Academy of Sciences - National Research Council, W. D. C. on B. and S. S. and E., Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (2000). How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. Expanded Edition. https://ezproxy.msu.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&AN=ED481522&site=eds-live&authtype=ip,guest&custid=s8364774&groupid=main&profile=eds.

Shanks, M. (n.d.). An introduction to design thinking process guide. web.stanford.edu. https://web.stanford.edu/~mshanks/MichaelShanks/files/509554.pdf.