Teaching for Learning

Essential Question: What teaching strategies make the best use of what we know about how people learn?

Brooks and Brooks (1993) list five conditions that exist in many classrooms today that are impediment to learning: 

• Classrooms are dominated by teacher talk.
• Most teachers rely heavily on textbooks.
• Students are encouraged to work in isolation on tasks that require low-level skills rather than higher-order reasoning.
• Student thinking is devalued in most classrooms. Teachers seek to enable students to know the "right" answer.
• Schooling is premised on the notion that there exists a fixed world that the learner must come to know. 

Constructivism

The solution , according to Brooks and Brooks and many others, is that teachers need to become constructivists; that is, "in the classroom, they must provide a learning environment where students search for meaning, appreciate uncertainty, and inquire responsibly" (1993, p.v.).

There are five overarching principles to constructivist pedagogy:

• Posing problems of emerging relevance to learners 
• Structuring learning around "big ideas" or primary concepts
• Seeking and valuing students' point of view
• Adapting curriculum to address students' suppositions 
• Assessing student learning in the context of teaching (Brooks and Brooks, 1993)

The constructivist point of view suggests that we construct our own understanding of the world in which we live. Sometimes, what we see makes sense to us based on our previous understandings; at other times, it's not consistent with what we understand, so we either alter it to fit our set of rules or change our set of rules to acknowledge this new information. Learning is not discovering more, but rather interpreting through a different scheme or structure (Brooks and Brooks, 1993). The goal for students is not to repeat what the teacher or the textbook has provided but to internalize the information that is around them so that they can generate their own meaning.


Piaget was one of the best-known advocates for constructivism. He described scientific thought as a dynamic process of continual construction and reorganization. However, his findings were not readily accepted by educators. In contrast, the work of behaviorists such as Skinner (1953) and Thorndike and Stein (1937) described human behavior as a stimulus-response relationship.