John & Tracy Knox (jknox@erie.net)
Fri, 9 Apr 1999 23:39:40 -0400
From: "John & Tracy Knox" <jknox@erie.net> Subject: Constructivist learning Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 23:39:40 -0400
I have been reading the messages on constructivism and have to add some personal observations. I entered teaching as a student oriented teacher. I have found that student centered learning has very deep problems. the first of which is that students all come to the classroom with preconceived ideas (schema) of how the world works. They will fit observations into those ideas while completely ignoring divergent data. It then occurred to me that this has been happening for thousands of years. Millions of people looked at the same phenomena as Newton before Newton but none of them figured it out. It took Newton to look at things in a new way. Students do the same thing. I've found that a teacher centered classroom along with student centered activities produce the most success. We have been effectively teaching people much longer than we have been effectively treating them medically. As such I do believe that we have come up with highly effective teaching strategies that have persisted for thousands of years. Written text along with a good text is a reliable way to teach people. I have yet to see anything on the web that is as good as a well written text book.
Another observation that I have made is that females can and do compete effectively in every way with the males in the classroom. In fact the majority of top performers in the classroom are female. There is not much if any gap in how males and females learn. I have found that males and females do work best, and learn best in same sex groupings as adolescents. Females do come to the classroom in general with more ability to work collaboratively, yet the difference is not staggering, and I can give you anecdotal evidence of males that were great team builders and females that could hardly work by themselves without getting into a fight.
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