Saturday, June 1, 2013

On Constructivism

This post is going to get a little bit wonky and will be very long. I want to organize my thoughts about the changing educational landscape in America and a good bit of it has to deal with and area of educational psychology/philosophy called Constructivism. I call it a philosophy because, although probably never intended this way, Constructivism has come to guide all of mainstream educational thinking. The Constructivist way of thinking sits beneath every major trend in education right now. Constructivism guides the push for widespread standardized testing and accountability. Constructivism girds the ubiquitous Common Core Standards. Most, if not all, degrees in education take Constructivism for granted as the one way students learn. The push for online courses assumes a Constructivist model of learning.

The Theory:

What is Constructivism? In it's simplest form, Constructivism is the belief that people, especially children, actively construct their learning from their environment. As a psychological theory of learning, Constructivism came as a mid-twentieth century response to behaviorism. Behaviorism held that people could essentially be trained based on positive and negative stimuli. Pavlov was a big behaviorist. 

I suppose it is important to mention at this point that there is now a rift within Constructivism. Early Constructivists who researched children, namely Piaget and Vygotsky, are the forerunners of most modern educational thinking. But, they are considered separate from the mainstream of cognitive psychology. Wikipedia has a great statement which adequately sums it up:
Many people confuse Constructivist (learning theory) with social constructivism. Constructivist learning theory is associated with high order learning of mature learners, androgogy or heutagogy, not early learning as discussed by the Cognitivist, Piaget[39] or Vygotsky,[40] whose research focused on children and sequential learning. Social constructivism is not congruent with the Constructivist learning theory. Dewey, Montessori, and Kolb represent the Constructivist learning theory where experiential learning occurs through real life experience to construct and conditionalize knowledge, and a mentor guides the mature learner. Piaget, Bruner, and Vygotsky are Cognitivist who work with young children and base their learning theories upon sequential development of mental processes scaffolded by an instructor.[41]
In short, Piaget believed that all children go through the same developmental stages, though the pacing may vary. As they aged, their learning should be guided by those with an understanding of the stages so that children could learn optimally within their cognitive ability. Vygotsky, somewhat differently, believed that children needed to be within an environment with a variety of challenges. Some challenges should be easy and others should be beyond that individual's capabilities. He thought that only through being around and observing others who could function at a higher level would the weaker individuals learn how to overcome new challenges. Collectively, learners could overcome any challenge by leveraging the strengths of each individual for the betterment of the group. It should be obvious why Vygotsky was a popular Soviet psychologist but that is a topic for another post.

Their theories are not wholly without merit and I do not mean to suggest that I reject the entirety of their view of learning. I do reject what their theories have come to be in the modern day educational world. Three major concepts have filtered down into classroom instruction from Constructivism: scaffolding, zone of proximal development, and differentiated instruction.

Scaffolding comes directly form Piaget. He argued that a child's learning must be scaffolded - carefully planned so that one learning experience builds upon prior experience. Piaget meant for this to be a lifelong process but the modern classroom believes that every lesson can be scaffolded. Each lesson should begin with accessing prior knowledge, then transition to sequentially more difficult tasks which depend on the one just before it. Most importantly, the learning must be student centered. Each child must construct the learning for him or herself. The teacher is merely a facilitator: a person who creates the learning environment and steps aside to let the learners flourish.

The zone of proximal development comes directly from Vygotsky. He thought that placing children in groups and having them face a series of taks of varying difficulty will allow them all to learn from each other. The ones who do't know how to do something will learn from the successes of the other students. The modern classroom brings ZPD into the way teachers create groups. Creating groups of mixed level students is assumed to be the best way to foster learning. 

Differentiation is sort of a hybrid of the two approaches. It's been around in some form or another since the 1970's and a way to bring these two theories into the classroom without having them completely conflict with one another. Differentiation grew out of the completely false belief in learning styles. Each child learns in a way conducive to his or her learning style. If lessons are created to target a variety of learning styles each student will latch onto the style which is best for him or her. That way, a class of students can all be learning the same thing at roughly the same pace (Piaget) while the variety of learning tasks (differentiation) will allow the strengths of each student (learning styles, differentiation again) to be shared with the group (Vygotsky). It is under the label of differentiation that increasing class sizes are justified. What's the difference between teaching 20, 30, or 40 kids if you create lessons which appeal to each child's learning style?

In The Classroom:

If you think back to your own schooling, you probably remember many such experiences. You get to class. The teacher has you working in groups, usually with kids you hate because they're lazy and you'll end up doing all the work. All around the room are a variety of modules or stations or whatever and you go from task to task which are loosely related to what your'e learning. Then you go to your next class and end up with a group project. You're in another group, maybe more to your liking, maybe not. You have a variety of tasks, possibly you get to pick from a set of options, and at the end of it your group needs to have some kind of finished product. Maybe you present it to the class. Throughout these experiences, your teacher mostly steps aside. He or she probably explains all the components and is available to answer questions but the whole experience is largely up to the students to complete.

You probably also remember how confused you were. Maybe how some teachers didn't really explain what they were looking for or how you thought you did a great job only to have a bad grade because you didn't do it right. Or maybe you loved it because it was usually really easy so long as your group either pitched in or stayed out of your way.

Because the truth of it is, Constructivism in the modern classroom is bullshit. We're facing a generation of kids whose background knowledge is so weak, whose experiences are so different from each other, and whose will to succeed is nonexistent that the Constructivist model of teaching is failing. When you could depend on a group of children who were roughly similar in motivation, background, and experience, you could depend on most of them succeeding in the classroom. What I see are teachers utterly unprepared to handle a style of teaching which went out of style 40 years ago. Namely, teaching skills explicitly.

Instead, we have people trying to reform their school through gimmicks, through accountability, and through increasing standardization.

The Gimmicks:

I cannot think of a better example of the effects of Constructivist thinking than my team teacher. I'm not going to comment much on his approach in particular because I believe that he is trying his hardest to make a meaningful change. Having worked with him for a whole school year, he is a dedicated and reflective teacher and someone from whom I learned a lot. I do not mean to present his project for ridicule or with any malice. We merely disagree about what really makes a difference in students' learning.


If you want to learn more about Scott's project I recommend checking out his Indegogo page or this article from the Huffington Post.

Throughout our nation's schools teachers are trying their best to reach students through a focus on creativity and self expression. They're trying to build experiences where students will be comfortable taking risks and tackling challenges. And it's all straight out of Constructivism. What I see in the classroom, the average classroom, is a total lack of basic skills: kids who are in 9th and 10th grade and can barely write sentences and barely comprehend grade level text.

On our final exam, students had to read an article about the effects of isolation on the body. It was a great pick because we've been reading Macbeth and Of Mice and Men, both great studies of isolation. The first question we asked was for students to summarize the passage. On the half of the tests I graded, the majority of students could not summarize the article. Most wrote something along the lines of "about isolation" or "it's about being lonely". Those aren't summaries of the article anymore than a summary of Harry Potter would be "it's about magic".

The Alternative:

Knowledge of basic reading and writing skills is an essential prerequisite to any creative writing, literary analysis, or formal research. Hell, it's a prerequisite to the rest of these kids' lives. The Atlantic ran a special debate last fall about just this issue. It's titled Why American Students Can't Write. I highly recommend reading all of it but I want to highlight two big points.

The first is an article by a teacher who resigned from teaching elementary school because he was fed up with a system which didn't teach what his kids needed (see if this sounds like Vygotsky to you). Robert Pondiscio writes in How Self Expression Damaged My Students:
We have become accustomed to thinking of educational failure as a function of a teacher's lack of effort, talent, or training. But sometimes the problem lies specifically in what we train teachers to do. Nowhere is this more evident than in the way we teach reading and writing to some of our most vulnerable students.
Every day, for two hours a day, I led my young students through Reader's and Writer's Workshop. I was trained not to address my kids as "students" or "class" but as "authors" and "readers." We gathered "seed ideas" in our Writer's Notebooks. We crafted "small moment" stories, personal narratives, and memoirs. We peer edited. We "shared out." Gathered with them on the rug, I explained to my 10-year-olds that "good writers find ideas from things that happened in their lives." That stories have "big ideas." That good writers "add detail," "stretch their words," and "spell the best they can."
Teach grammar, sentence structure, and mechanics? I barely even taught. I "modeled" the habits of good readers and "coached" my students. What I called "teaching," my staff developer from Teacher's College dismissed as merely "giving directions." My job was to demonstrate what good readers and writers do and encourage my students to imitate and adopt those behaviors.
The second is the debate headliner from Atlantic writer Peg Tyre, The Writing Revolution
During her freshman year at New Dorp, a ’70s-style brick behemoth near a grimy beach, her history teacher asked her to write an essay on Alexander the Great. At a loss, she jotted down her opinion of the Macedonian ruler: “I think Alexander the Great was one of the best military leaders.” An essay? “Basically, that wasn’t going to happen,” she says, sweeping her blunt-cut brown hair from her brown eyes. “It was like, well, I got a sentence down. What now?” Monica’s mother, Santa, looked over her daughter’s answer—six simple sentences, one of which didn’t make sense—with a mixture of fear and frustration. Even a coherent, well-turned paragraph seemed beyond her daughter’s ability. An essay? “It just didn’t seem like something Monica could ever do.”
For decades, no one at New Dorp seemed to know how to help low-performing students like Monica, and unfortunately, this troubled population made up most of the school, which caters primarily to students from poor and working-class families. In 2006, 82 percent of freshmen entered the school reading below grade level. Students routinely scored poorly on the English and history Regents exams, a New York State graduation requirement: the essay questions were just too difficult. Many would simply write a sentence or two and shut the test booklet. In the spring of 2007, when administrators calculated graduation rates, they found that four out of 10 students who had started New Dorp as freshmen had dropped out, making it one of the 2,000 or so lowest-performing high schools in the nation.
When I read this, I see cause and effect. There is a very clear connection between failure to prepare students for reading and writing in lower grades and high dropout rates in high school. When kids don't have the skills necessary to read and write, they fail. Once they enter high school, their failures become more consistent and more damaging. Kids find themselves having to take and retake standardized assessments as they fail one after another. Although these articles are both from New York, I have seen the same thing in two Georgia high schools. Ultimately, it's all a logical result of Constructivist approaches to education. Get the teacher out of the way and let the students express themselves. The result is confusion, discouragement, and failure.

What did New Dorp do about it?
And so the school’s principal, Deirdre DeAngelis, began a detailed investigation into why, ultimately, New Dorp’s students were failing. By 2008, she and her faculty had come to a singular answer: bad writing. Students’ inability to translate thoughts into coherent, well-argued sentences, paragraphs, and essays was severely impeding intellectual growth in many subjects. Consistently, one of the largest differences between failing and successful students was that only the latter could express their thoughts on the page.
...
Pass rates for the English Regents, for example, bounced from 67 percent in June 2009 to 89 percent in 2011; for the global-­history exam, pass rates rose from 64 to 75 percent. The school reduced its Regents-repeater classes—cram courses designed to help struggling students collect a graduation requirement—from five classes of 35 students to two classes of 20 students.
The Standardization:

By now Common Core is the name of the game in 44 states and Washington DC. On the surface, it's nothing more than a new set of statements about what students should know by what grade levels (sounds an awful lot like Piaget). The focus is on putting most schools on the same page when it comes to learning. Ideally, kids should be receiving the same quality of education regardless of where they go to school and the standards are the next step in a long line of attempts to reach that goal. The big issue being hashed out in many states, especially in Georgia, is whether or not this amounts to a federal takeover of education. They're wrong on a few levels: first, Common Core is run by a consortium of states not the feds; second, the standards don't dictate curriculum or how a teacher can teach. What they really should have objected to was the federal funds from Race to the Top which contained huge stipulations to institute more standardized testing, overhaul teacher evaluations, and create a merit pay system. Again, though, that's a discussion for another time.

The real idea put forward by the standardization movement is that the teachers and students don't matter. It's odd, I know, because the whole point is to improve those students but it is just another extension of Constructivist educational philosophy. If all that is needed is a sufficient educational environment, then why not mandate that all education environments everywhere are the same? It's not about having a good teacher because teachers really don't have a role beyond curating this environment. It's not about the students (their income, academic preparation, or background) because they just need the right environment to aid in their construction of knowledge. Common Core and the reforms from Race to the Top are pushing for that standardization of environment.

Testing, too, is a product of Constructivism. When all students are assumed to have the same Constructivist cognitive processes, it is not unreasonable to expect them all to master the same skills and knowledge at the same rate. In the new RttT parlance, students must "show growth" on these tests year after year. Most teachers and parents understand how absurd this is. For example, how does one take World History in 10th grade, and then show growth in 11th grade when he takes US History? Although there are shared skills, the content junior year is not necessarily constructing n the foundations laid sophomore year. Or take the sciences for example. Students take biology freshmen year and physical science sophomore year. Again, related but not to the point where the testing is going to be meaningful.

We're at the point where the physical and curricular environment doesn't matter to the policy makers and agenda pushers. When they talk about the learning environment, they're really asking whether or not a teacher is getting to all the standards. Let me put that more simply: Standards = Learning Environment. If you put what the standards dictate in front of the students (and scaffold, and ZPD, and differentiate effectively) then the it is assumed that the students learned the standards. Again, the teacher and student don't matter in this Constructivist world, only the environment.

For Profit Education:

Furthermore, the growth of charter and for-profit public schools is heavily steeped the in the language of Constructivism. For example Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone charter network at the center of Waiting for Superman:
Called "one of the most ambitious social-service experiments of our time," by The New York Times, the Harlem Children's Zone Project is a unique, holistic approach to rebuilding a community so that its children can stay on track through college and go on to the job market.
The goal is to create a "tipping point" in the neighborhood so that children are surrounded by an enriching environment of college-oriented peers and supportive adults, a counterweight to "the street" and a toxic popular culture that glorifies misogyny and anti-social behavior. 
Again, environment is key. But unlike HCZ, many of the schools being launched nation wide are merely aping the language of Constructivism to gain access to state and federal education money. Often times they are no more effective than traditional schools yet they are just as expensive. Here's a great example from Students First, the "non-profit" company started by Michelle Rhee after she abandoned Washington DC schools:
Michelle summed it up this way: "We very, very strongly believe at StudentsFirst there is no shortage of great educators who are out there. We know that every kid can learn regardless of what obstacles they face, if they're in a good school environment. The bottom line is that they're forced to operate in this incredibly bureaucratic environment that is driven by antiquated laws and policies."
Which vision sounds more like an "incredibly bureaucratic environment that is driven by antiquated laws and policies?" One in which local schools and districts are able to make independent decisions about how to teach their students or Rhee's solution: more standardization, more centralization, and more accountability measures based on Constructivist ideas of learning, like Common Core:
Common Core makes it possible to measure the progress of students from state to state against the same metrics, enabling policymakers to make better decisions regarding everything from adoption of instructional methods to resource allocations to professional development.

My vote for bureaucracy goes with the system planning to "measure progress" and track "metrics" to guide "resource allocation". Under the guise of Constructivist educational language, big money is being made by test prep companies, charter school conglomerates, education management corporations, and consultancies like Rhee's. If only the environment was right, the kids would learn. If only these pesky teachers and bureaucrats were out of the way, the kids would learn. Nothing else matters beyond exposure to the right stuff.

The Mass Produced Learning Environment:

This has numerous implications. Districts nationwide are pursuing online options to reduce costs and increase course offerings. Some states have approved public high schools which are completely online. Although there's nothing inherently wrong with online education, the products being delivered to students' screens are, frankly, terrible. It's obvious there's not quality control and no accountability on the company manufacturing the software. All they have to prove is that they expose students to standards.

Over the last few years I've had the misfortune of working with various online platforms from my county. Some are designed to be test-prep software for the yearly standardized exams. Some are whole courses taught through the computer as remediation for students who failed a class. Overall, my impression is very, very negative. Not only is the content of the programs often confusingly presented or outright wrong, but no meaningful learning takes place.

This past week, a student of mine was trying to finish an online class so he could attend graduation. Due to final exams we had half days all week and he came to my room after his exam each day. Together we worked on finishing his online class to make up for second semester of 9th grade English. It was easily one of the most frustrating experiences of the year. Working on this program was right up there with visiting the DMV.

The semester was broken down into 5 units and a final exam. Each unit consisted of a variety of learning tasks and a quiz. Unit one would be about, say, pronouns. He would click the first link, watch a narrated slide show, and the get sent back to the start page. That opened the second link which were several practice questions. You could try as many times as you liked but the end of unit quiz would only open if you scored higher than 70%. There was no indication of which questions you answered correctly or why those answers were correct. The end of unit quiz was the exact same questions but you could not retake it. You could not skip questions or go back after you answered them. If you did not make a 70% or higher then you did not pass the unit. Moreover, if you did not pass the unit, you could not unlock the semester test and could not, therefore, complete the course.

The defacto result of this brilliant online learning environment was that failing a single quiz on a single unit results in failing the course. My student had completed and passed every unit but one and had been trying since February to pass the unit quiz so he could unlock the semester exam. Every time he took that unit quiz and failed it he had to go to the office and meet with our school's graduation coach and ask him to unlock the unit so he could try again.

This year, my district is running all of their summer school classes through the same online portal.

You may be asking what this has to do with Constructivism. Everything. Once we head down the Constructivist path, all of education collapses into exposure. "Are the kids exposed to the right learning environment?" becomes "Are the kids exposed to the standards?" If all that matters is that the kids are exposed to a skill or idea outlined by the standards, then the classroom ceases to matter. In the Constructivist world, where Learning Environment = Standards, it doesn't matter whether a student is exposed to the standards by a teacher or an online platform. In the Constructivist world, the result should be the same.

Summing it up:

This post is long winded and probably not a comprehensive as I want to be. I hope I've at least made my case: that Constructivism is the central, unifying philosophy which connects everything that's happening in education today. The bigger point, though, is that it doesn't have to be. As I'll begin presenting later, modern science is quickly discovering how our brains function and how learning really works. It's shining new light on old methods of teaching which probably seem ore familiar to the baby boomer generation than to ours. We're at the beginning of a new era of teaching which harkens back to the educations our grandparents received: an education rooted in skills taught by skilled people. An education grown out of the community students' lived in instead of a board room at a Wall St. hedge fund. We're at the start of the Neo-Classical period in education. 

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