North Star Constructivism
I have just returned (and am still recovering!) from the 2007 Constructivist Design Conference in Grand Island, New York. It was my 15th conference, and every year - from my first summer attending as a student, to this year representing FableVision and working with a team of student teachers, I leave the week feeling refueled and energized.
What struck me most this year was the vocabulary I heard (and not just from Get A Clue!). Constructivists refer to student-centered classrooms, hands-on learning, and teacher-as-guide… certainly sounds like the North Star to me!
But the most amazing moment for me was watching an 8-year-old teach five teachers how to create a rubric. After a week of writing (and rating her own) newspaper articles for the “Daily Constructivist” with other students aged 8-13, she felt confident enough to explain the concept to the (rather amused, and very awed) teachers. I introduced her to Stationery Studio soon after, and maybe next year she’ll be writing her rubrics on that!
July 31st, 2007 at 12:12 pm
Sounds like a great conference! That 8-year-old could teach me a thing or two. I’ve often heard that when students are put in the role of teacher, they actually learn more, and feel more invested in the process. Peter Reynolds often tells how his math teacher once enlisted him to help teach math using animation. This is a very “North Star” technique. Does anyone else have stories about students being more actively involved in the learning process?
August 1st, 2007 at 1:03 pm
It was a fantastic conference - lots of new things to learn, ways of using rubrics to assess, and using new sorts of organization strategies or group work to reach more students. All very North Star.
I’ll never forget being in a history class where I was allowed to sing a period piece - I had to explain everything I did, from why we chose that piece to why we sang certain sections the way we did, to what we were wearing in terms of the culture and facts of the time. I know WW2 history a lot better than any other time period, thanks to that project!
August 2nd, 2007 at 6:42 am
I just found another great sample of hands-on lessons. Alfred University is apparently creating a whole collection of science lessons for high school classrooms, which relate to the Adirondack Mountains! It’s a limited area of the country, but for classrooms around the mountain range (where I grew up, so I have a particular connection to this idea) it’s a fantastic opportunity to take the abstract and put it into applicable, authentic scenarios.
(I found the article here: http://www.alfred.edu/pressreleases/viewrelease.cfm?&ID=4095)
My science classes were categorized by memorization which didn’t take, and teachers telling me I’d “go far” in science if I could just get my head around those basic concepts. According to them, bio and physics and environmental science were all applicable to things I enjoyed and could relate to, if I only tried. Somehow, reading the boring, old, books of formulas didn’t grab me quite the way this idea does!