It Has A Name!

Picture this...a penny dropping, a light bulb going on, me smacking my forehead in the "I coulda had a V8" fashion. Now I get it! It's constructivist learning/teaching. That's what we've been up to all these weeks. It's the big picture. It's what we're doing in TEAM and what, ideally, we will bring to our classrooms. It's different.

I've been going bleary-eyed reading about constructivism this week but I can't stop. That's me being obsessive again. Constructivism is the new StumbleUpon. Just one more article and then I'll go to bed. The links that were in the weekly calendar, ironically (?) under the heading "guided instruction",  were a great place to start and I find myself returning to them for clear definitions and thumbnail descriptions. Skimmed through some things in Google Scholar and iTunes U. iTunes U has a pretty good podcast called Learning Theory which has one episode on constructivist theory. Quite honestly I've been avoiding the LIU library for the same reason that I'll never get a doctorate. I can't bear reading scholarly papers. Frankly, I'd rather have root canal than wade through all those abstracts searching for something that isn't a snoozefest.  My apologies to everyone who has labored for years over a dissertation. I'm sure there are some riveting ones out there. I promise to check into the library at some point.

But I digress. Back to constructivism. Isn't this why we became teachers in the first place? It's the "teach a man to fish" idea. I don't want to tell kids a bunch of stuff. I want to teach them how to learn. No, wait, I want to teach them to love learning. I want to honor their natural curiousity, to guide them in constructing their own learning. It's so much more fun. For me. And, I'm guessing, for them.

Well, I have tons I want to say about this constructivist model. Like a religious convert, I've seen the light! But it's at the end of a tunnel right now so I have some more thinking to do. Stay tuned.