Module Response: Constructivism

QUESTION: Constructivist learning environments focus on giving students authentic, real-world, ill-structured problems to solve. What methods (based on your readings) could you as a teacher use (with or without technology to support you) to facilitate this process? That is, how would you provide scaffolding for students in a given environment (you might want to use a specific lesson/learning environment as a way to discuss scaffolds).

RESPONSE: In order to create a constructivist learning environment, students must have the prior knowledge to be able to approach an ill-structured problem. For instance, a broad 7th grade American History topic would be the American Revolution. If the students are expected to study the contribution of Revolutionary heroes, the ill-structured question would probably be - "Which Revolutionary figure do you think is the most under appreciated in American history?" Students in the class must first study the basic storyline of the American Revolution in order to scaffold their knowledge base. Perhaps a biographical research project would introduce the concept of different types of contribution of individuals to a specific cause such as independence. For example, Thomas Jefferson's eloquent composition skills used in the writing of the Declaration of Independence or Nathan Hale's risky spying on the British that resulted in the lose of his life, etc. From studying the renown historical characters, students will learn to identify various forms of contribution and its significance in the context of a historical event. In addition, to further scaffold students' prior knowledge, they can pick the top contributors into an imaginary Revolutionary Hall of Fame - this activity would give the students practice in evaluating different actions of historic figures and ranking their importance. Hopefully, these basic skills would provide enough building block and scaffolding when students approach the problem of finding an under-appreciated hero or heroine of the American Revolution. Lastly, it would be intrinsically motivated because in order to pick the best candidate, students will want to get as much information as possible on different characters in order to make a clever choice.