So, my most recent instructor had a bunch of readings on these two theories. (If you bothered to read this post, I'm assuming you are some kind of education nerd like me and are somewhat familiar with these....if not...may I recommend wikipedia or...Wikipedia...?)
But in any event...in many of the articles I've read about these approaches, it seems like the authors are putting them in opposition to each other. That there is a great debate about how to teach people and Only One May Prevail. I get this for battling academicians out to make their reputations. But for me as a teacher...I almost can't understand how I wouldn't use both...
Constructivism, as I understand it, is tied intimately to the project of sense-making or meaning-making. As I get it, it involves presenting learners with a problem or discrepancy, and asks them to try to a) solve the problem and b) as a result of their observations and experiences, come up with general principals or theories related to the topic. (am I getting warm, oh studiers of educational theory?)
To me, this is very appealing. It imagines learners as active participants as opposed to recipients of knowledge - not bank accounts where information may be deposited, but rather sovereign humans, with experiences and opinions and brains, who learn through their own analysis of their world.
Cognitive Load Theory, as I've encountered it thus far, is just a different animal. It looks at how our brains work, particularly our two different kinds of memory, and how new things are (or are not) integrated with old things that we already know.
To me, this is also very appealing. It draws its lifeblood from carefully controlled research and statistics, and interrogates some of our treasured notions of teaching. It looks at how we actually process information and solve problems, and challenges us as teachers to justify why we are including each element - will it really help learners understand new material?
The Cognitive folks seems, so far, to be either dismissive or...carefully neutral around constructivist teaching. Most CLT research has been completed around simple problems in the STEM fields with correct answers and easily-testable solutions. I think this research has brought us tremendous insight...but does not encompass the all of teaching.
The $64,000 question these days is - what about complex, unpredictable problems? What about problems for which the very method of solving them is unknown? How can we prepare students for that?
And of course...innovation. Can we prepare students for "creativity" or "innovation" or are those things a bit immune to teaching?
My answer, in the next post....
Personally I had trouble with learning theory until I realized that they overlap and no one theory describes all learning. It was a real ah-ha moment for me. I blogged about it here because the image helps explain it http://rjh.goingeast.ca/2011/09/24/learning-theories/
ReplyDeleteI find that learning theories are closely tied to epistemology. I came to the conclusion that when it comes to learning and knowledge that I am agnostic. I don't think we can ever have a single theory that will describe everything. Each theory tries to describe something, but that something is only a small part of the whole picture, and the whole picture will always have gaps.
Glad to see you are still blogging :-)