Dr. Steven Lorch is the founding head of the Solomon Schechter School of Manhattan. Prior to that he headed the Akiba Hebrew Academy (PA), Mount Scopus College (Melbourne, Australia), and the Hartman High School (Jerusalem). Read his related article, “The ‘New’ Academic Rigor” here.
Constructivism has proven to be a controversial approach, both educationally and philosophically. This section sets out, and attempts to refute, three of the strongest and most persistent critiques that have been leveled against constructivist theory and practice.
Critique: Constructivism is relativistic; there are no right or wrong answers. – The first objection to constructivism operates on two levels, both the theoretical and the practical. Philosophical constructivism, it is argued, claims that the subjective understanding of the individual or the group is more important than any objective reality, and therefore undermines any idea of an absolute truth, leading to the dangerous notion that one truth is as good as any other (Hirsch, 1996; Phillips, 2000; McCarty and Schwandt, 2000; Loveless, 2001). In addition, constructivist practice is said to privilege children’s innate capacities, free expression, and constructed understanding over teachers’ abilities to organize and guide instruction, resulting in an unwillingness or inability to correct student errors (Hirsch, 1996; Geary, 2001).
Response: The theoretical critique is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the dynamics of Piaget’s assimilation and accommodation, of the complex interplay between the continuities of normal science and the evolution of paradigms in revolutionary science in Kuhn, and of Vygotsky’s dialectical pathway toward the pursuit of truth across human history (Liu and Matthews, 2005). Rather than pointing toward an underlying relativism, constructivism posits that there is, in fact, an objective truth which is the ultimate aim of the pursuit of knowledge. Understanding, on both an individual and a collective level, evolves in such a way that we are always in the process of coming closer to the absolute truth, even though the mind’s representation of the truth may never fully coincide with the absolute truth of the real world.
In practical terms, the educational critique of constructivism as a method that accepts student errors might have a kernel of truth in a school or a classroom which practices constructivist teaching exclusively. Fortunately, I have never seen or heard of such a pure case. Schools in the real world are hybrids which emphasize one educational model but incorporate other approaches, as well, at least some of the time (Elkind, 2003).
For example, when kindergarten children at Schechter Manhattan write a story, or speak Hebrew, or solve a math problem, teachers do in fact affirm their efforts without overtly correcting them. At this stage, imprecision is accepted as a necessary byproduct of learning to take risks and engage fearlessly in academic pursuits, although implicit corrections, such as sounding out a word slowly so that a child can hear a final sound, or repeating a child’s Hebrew sentence with an error corrected, are part of the classroom experience from the very beginning. However, by first grade, children are already expected to recognize and correct some errors, and by the end of the elementary years, their basic skills are at least on a par with those of children of comparable ability in more traditional schools.
Critique: Students constructing knowledge take too long to figure it out and lose valuable learning time, leading to lower motivation. – According to this objection, constructivist learning is inefficient because students sometimes get bogged down along the way to discovering new knowledge or formulating a new concept. Because most of their time is spent finding their way to the new construct, and because little effective learning can take place until the construct has been found, much valuable time is wasted even when the search is eventually successful. Learning time can be used more efficiently through direct instruction and guided practice (Anderson et al., 2000).
Response: This critique overlooks three key aspects of constructivist teaching and learning: first, the teacher is not absent or passive while students are engaged in a learning task. When teachers design situations with appropriate resources and support built in, arrange groups so that students can use each other as resources, anticipate obstacles and misunderstandings, and respond to questions with appropriate clarifying questions and guidance, they can significantly streamline students’ discovery process.
Second, the moment of discovery is often accompanied by a flash of realization, an “aha!” experience, that makes the culmination of the discovery process far more consequential than its duration might suggest. Conversely, the mindlessness and partial inattentiveness with which students sometimes approach rote learning and repetitive practice – even when they are technically on task – can diminish the efficiency of direct instruction.
Finally, the view that time spent searching for a new construct is time lost to learning undervalues the considerable ancillary learning that takes place while students are working on a task but before they have figured it out. The learning includes subject-matter related outcomes (for example, discovering that several solutions don’t work) as well as insights into social (e.g., I learned something about how a classmate and I interact) and metacognitive (e.g., I learned something about what gets in the way of my learning) processes.
Critique: When schools fail to teach for breadth as well as depth, they produce cultural illiterates. – According to the third and final objection, because each constructivist learning episode takes longer than it would if the teacher had taught it directly, the graduates of a constructivist education know a great deal about very little. But because future learning also hinges to a large extent on students’ having extensive stores of shared knowledge, the victims of constructivist learning, deprived of much of this shared heritage, are forever handicapped in their ability to acquire new learning by association (Hirsch, 1996).
Response: Much rich content learning takes place in the constructivist classroom, though the shared knowledge tends to cluster around fewer topics studied in greater depth than in traditional classrooms. For example, first graders who explore a theme such as the human body tend to take away extremely detailed knowledge about their organs, senses, and body systems, though they may have less information about animal or plant life than do children in a traditional classroom.
Moreover, the objection that the products of constructivist education are not well informed or well rounded is based on a fallacy. In reality, students in constructivist schools, including Schechter Manhattan, learn both b’iyun (in depth) and for b’kiut (extensively). Not only do they read literature and analyze it at length; they also read widely for pleasure. They not only study selected p’rakim of Chumash intensively; they also regularly study parashat hashavua. The alternation between studying in depth and studying for breadth produces students who have been steeped in the best of both educational traditions.
In addition, we should not accept uncritically the claim that direct instruction invariably produces shared knowledge that is available for future learning. In the first place, what schools prescribe that teachers should teach (the intended curriculum) is not identical with what the teacher actually teaches (the taught curriculum), which in turn is not the same as the information students actually learn (the learned curriculum), which differs from how they make sense of what they learn (the internal curriculum) (Cuban, 1992). As knowledge passes from curriculum guide to teacher to student, the quality of the shared knowledge becomes degraded, often severely so. Furthermore, studies have repeatedly shown that teaching methods that emphasize rapid learning of large quantities of information result in poor retention of knowledge (Bahrick, 2000). Therefore, students exposed to direct instruction, in which the information taught tends to be discrete and the pace rapid, are less likely to remember what they learned than are the products of constructivist learning.
Fundamentally, however, this critique misses the crucial point implicit in the enumeration of survival skills associated with the new academic rigor (see p. 1 above) that a large store of factual information isn’t nearly as important as it used to be, nor is it as necessary now and in the future as knowing how to access, acquire, and analyze information. Wagner (2008b, p. 22) writes that about fifteen years ago, he “heard then-Harvard University president Neil Rudenstine say in a speech that “the half-life of knowledge in the humanities is ten years, and in math and science, it’s only two or three years,” a rate of obsolescence that is not likely to have decreased in the interim, and may very well have accelerated.
References
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