Here's my take on CLT & constructivism:

....it's a work in progress.

Cognitive Load Theory asks the intriguing question: is it ever helpful to withhold information from students?

This question matters to this debate because, in the end, this is at the heart of constructivism.  The idea is that students uncover information & principles through their own investigation - and thus "own" this information in a way that is completely different than if they had simply been told to memorize a rule or concept by rote.

For example, I've read about teaching elementary students about calculating volume not by teaching a formula, but by having them mess around with 3-D models of buildings, shapes made of 1 cm blocks, jars of different sizes filled with water, and by having them predict & calculate volume, and, when faced with unexpected results, find their own motivation to explore more, gather more data, and develop a rule on their own.

To me, that sounds mega-cooler than simply memorizing a formula.



How the CLT folks might counter is ....sure, memorizing a formula might limit your ability to understand how to apply the principle.  However, why not just show the kiddies worked examples?   Why not just demonstrate how you measure volume in multiple different situations, and demonstrate the results, and then have students practice it a few times?  Research has shown (see that link above) that attending to someone work their way through a problem, with guidance, is very effective in helping novice learners do it themselves later on.  And from what we know about the brain, while those kiddies are measuring and counting and comparing, there's precious little brain-juice (ok ok working memory) left over for any other kind of work.  Including coming up with overarching theories or explanations.

Huh.

As a young, passionate grad student, I fell in love with constructivism.  It was the way I'd been taught, and it seemed in line with social justice principles: students are human beings, not bank accounts where learning might be deposited, and they deserve to experience agency as learners.  "Our students have brains and hearts!" I wanted to shout.

And yet.  For the past five years I've taught what I'd consider some academically vulnerable students.  And what I've learned is that my students just don't learn by osmosis.  We can have scintillating class discussion, utilize laser-targeted strategies, break down huge tasks into very do-able steps...and still...many will still really struggle when confronted with a novel version of the problem.  Only the very strongest of students will spontaneously understand how to abstract & transfer understanding to a new situation after working through a problem.

I have to be 100% explicit with them: This is the strategy I want you to use on every paragraph in your essay.  This is the method you should use when confronted with a complex essay question.  These are the steps you should be taking to annotate each and every reading.  This is why this will help you.  

After a few years, I realized that the lack of ability to transfer a concept from one context to another is not about laziness or even non-compliance.  It's just that they literally sometimes don't think to apply the problem-solving activities that we do in class to another problem.*

At this point in my own development as a teacher, I also assume that what's going on is that some (many) of my students have "extraneous load" happening to them all the time.  The way they process information (especially with regard to text-based work)  consumes so much of their working memory that there's not a ton of space left over to do abstraction & transfer (this is especially true for folks with language-based learning disorders).   The solidification of a concept, or the application in a novel situation - those things have to happen separately from the "doing" or "discovering" stages.  They need a heuristic or they will be totally overwhelmed by a flood of new information from a new problem.

And yet, all of a sudden, I feel like a "banker" again, making knowledge deposits in my students.

So how to resolve these conflicting desires - the desire to empower (through critical thinking) vs. the desire to empower (through raw success)?  Here's my current pointers:

1.  No "discovery" activity should take place in the total absence of a lot of explicit reflection, guided discussion and concretization of principles. *
2. Worked examples are a wonderful idea.  After years of not knowing how to prepare students for unstructured problems (in my case, challenging and complicated essay prompts), it is a huge relief to know that having them watch me follow a heuristic and work my way through some knotty prompts myself is a great way to have them learn (rather than just watching them miss key clues and then flunk the essay when I let them "discover" on their own).  I plan to use lots of "think-alouds"and demonstrations going forward. 
3. I plan to give my students heuristics whenever possible.  Expecting students to "just know" the best way to attack unstructured problems like research essays is really unfair - especially for anyone whose processing capacity is already being used just to decode written text or get through academic life. 
4. At the same time, I do believe there is something wonderful about giving students the opportunity to have their own "aha" moment. Curiosity, engagement, motivation and exploration are the values we are encouraging when we give students real, challenging problems to solve.  We are not just teaching a concept, but a way of learning.  We are teaching grit & persistence in the face of difficulty, and faith in one's own abilities & intelligence.  We are teaching critical thinking & the scientific process: observe evidence, draw conclusions.  I think teaching someone to pay attention to, and to value their own observations and thoughts is an irreplaceable thing to happen in a classroom. 
5. However, given that some students are going to find unstructured problems totally overwhelming, I think it's unethical not to support students in their confrontation of various educational problems. 
6. So here's my compromise: when it comes to understanding the concepts in our readings, I let them wander in the wilderness, seeing what they notice & react to and chewing through the complicated parts.  However, when it comes to reading/writing process, I become prescriptive.  I give them a note-taking format.  I prepare a short video on annotations & outlines.  I take them step-by-step on how to write an academic paragraph.  I scaffold their revision process.  I model best practices. I give them points for each step along the way.  I teach them procedure as much as I can. 

 When I think back to times that I was a novice, I think how comforting it would've been to see multiple different demonstrations of how to do the thing instead of "practicing" and always feel like I didn't even know where to begin: algebra word problems, chemistry problems, English essays, history essays - heck, it was even helpful in college for someone to teach me how to take notes in the margins of my readings!  This is so natural to how we learn - we learn through endless imitation and coaching.   So a smart teacher strikes a balance.  We look for times when we can we set up situations of discovery & exploration, where students are faced with real-world problems & conundrums, where they must wander in the woods, deal with conflicting information, shades of gray, evidence that doesn't match their hypothesis.   And then sometimes we also must be explicit: spell out the theory or procedure, correct confusing misconceptions, demonstrate the way an expert would solve the problem.  Give them a chance to practice or watch an expert practice, over and over again.

A practical example I can think of might involve teaching med students to do a differential diagnosis (think the team of doctors on the TV show House solving medical mysteries).  They'll need to know some strategies for minimizing time-consuming guesswork, and watching an expert work though a few problems, and hearing about their strategies, would help them start to internalize these.  At the same time, they'll need to learn to trust their own observations, intuitions & creativity.  They might be helped by failing a couple of times (check out this delightful study on productive failure ).  By combining these two philosophies, students will be engaged AND have a more equitable shot at success.

PostNote: *(After writing this, I found out that this compromise I've written about is basically the conclusion that Richard Mayer came to after studying 50 years of experiments around guided, unguided & expository teaching.  Students absolutely did NOT come to understand abstract principles *just* by doing and discovering.  Mayer writes, "In short, when students have too much freedom, they may fail to come into contact with the to-be-learned material.   There is nothing magical to ensure that simply discussing a problem or working on a problem will lead to discovering its solution.  If the learner fails to come into contact with the to-be-learned material, no amount of activity or discussion will help the learner make sense of it."  His compromise, which he called "guided exploration" came out the winner in almost every comparison, beating both expository (banking) teaching as well as "hands-off" style discovery).