Chapter 2 Question 2

1. Chapter 2Question 2 2. Read Cory’s brief article, “The poor scholar’s soliloquy,” at http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=27849895 (which requires you to log in your credit card number in order to get the entire article – boo!). This piece was written in 1944. Is the situation the boy describes still typical of American education? Can you cite ways in which more constructivist approaches could benefit this child?

4. I do believe that this scenario still describes a typical public education. There is a surplus of mandatory curriculum outcomes that have little, if any, ties to the real world for students. It may be that there are practical applications for these outcomes but they are not properly explained by teachers or interacted with in a way that engages students.

5. Integration to foster creative problem solving and metacognition. This article is overflowing with examples of how to use creative problem solving. These include: calculating oil consumption for a trip, understanding diesel engine pumps, managing stock to sell at market, billing farmers, practical measurements, shop creations for real-life applications, and practical civic duties that matter in the here and now. A constructivist teacher would have their students run with these ideas and then document their evolution using technology to share with and explain to their classmates.  

6. Integration to help build mental models and increase knowledge transfer.  Within each of this student’s extra-curricular activities are many compound problems to solve. To learn each of these in isolation would be relatively meaningless and dull due to a lack of real-world application. A constructivist teacher would embrace this student’s work outside of school and work to deconstruct the components to view them individually and to better appreciate them as they work in a real-world collective. This also shows how problem-solving skills can be relevant to learners.

7. Integration to foster group cooperation skills. The student’s participation in the civic duties of volunteering to clean up a neighbourhood park and build a playground would require many hands. This would also require planning for manpower (scheduling), purchasing (math and budgeting), fund-raising (math and social studies), and building (measurement, physical education, and physics). Any and all of these would require group cooperation. Any constructivist teacher would see the depth of potential for student learning to happen here.

8. Integration to allow for multiple and distributed intelligences. A constructivist teacher would have their class complete intelligence inventories to discover where individuals’ strengths lie. This would allow the students to best align themselves to the parts of the jobs that would need to be done to work through the types of real-world problems the student has written about in this article. Students would build self-esteem knowing that they could use their strengths to assist in completing a task. This would also allow students to see how many different strengths can work together (see fostering group cooperation skills) to complete a real-world task.

9. Phye (1997) states that constructivism is a movement that combines cognition from a developmental perspective with other important issues, such as motivation, self-directed learning, and a focus on the social context of learning. These constructivist approaches could benefit this child: • Allowing independence and opportunities to take initiative • Providing hand-on activities • Link learning to real life possibilities • Building on students’ prior-knowledge • Encouraging discussion with teacher and other students • Asking open-ended questions • Allowing response time • Encouraging inquiry-base learning • Flexibility in lesson • Using precise words such as create, predict, classify and analyse • Encouraging exploration and questioning of hypotheses Reference http://www.pbs.org/teacherline/courses/inst335/docs/inst335_brooks.pdf

10. The Poor Scholar:Questioning Constructivism “Romancing A Generation?”

11. "The central educational fallacy of our time:that one can think without having anything to think about." - Heather Mac Donald

12. Kids Can’t Read or do Math, but they still feel really good about themselves

13. One Cynic’s Testimony: Hirsh (2001) As a society, we've been chasing the chimera of progressive education through most of the 20th century, and now it's come home with a vengeance. Points to consider:

14. # 1 • We have kids who can't read or spell very well, can't multiply or make change without a calculator, can't form logical arguments and can't think coherently, who don't know the difference between the Civil War and the American Revolution, never heard of the Reformation or the Enlightenment, and who haven't a clue what Charlemagne, Newton, Jefferson or Dickens did.

15. # 2 • They can't sit still because no one ever told them to just sit down and listen, they can't think or work independently because they've been depending on their collaborative workgroups since Kindergarten, and they don't know how to ask questions because they have little experience in dealing with definite factual answers

16. # 3 • Later in life, they take vacations to places they can't find on a map.

17. But they do have terrific self-esteem, a sense of entitlement, and have been romanced into thinking the real world will make allowances for them.

18. 'Trouble at the Happiest School on Earth.' • "According to the New York Times, the Disney school was to follow the 'most advanced' progressive educational methods. ... Such methods, although they have been in use for decades, have rarely worked well. The Celebration School was no exception. The Times article began, 'The start of the school year here is just a few days away, so it was no surprise that there was a line of parents at the Celebration School office the other day. But the reason for the line was: they were queuing up to withdraw their children.' Parents said they were dissatisfied with the lack of clear academic goals and measures of achievement, as well as with the lack of order and structure that accompanied the progressive methods.“ (Hirsch 2001)

19. Further Research to refute constructivism • One researcher believes memorization has become archaic and has more or less been fully replaced by a more constructivist approach. Michael Knox-Baren (2004) stated “...if there’s one thing progressive educators don’t like it’s rote learning. As a result, we now have several generations of Americans who’ve never memorized much of anything. Even highly educated people in their thirties and forties are often unable to recite half a dozen lines of classic poetry or prose.”

20. Blog post from Michael Kaechele from Michigan,US, a teacher in a problem based learning school “Is rote memorization a 21st Century skill? One of the things that has amazed me in my 5 years of teaching a Grade 6 math-focused technology class is how many kids do not know the answer to simple math problems like 3 x 7. They want to use a calculator for basic math facts.”

21. Not totally against it but raises a good point: • Kirshner, Sweller, Clark (2006) The advantage of guidance begins to recede only when learners have sufficiently high prior knowledge to provide “internal” guidance. • Basically, the research indicates that 21st century classrooms may need a marriage of both inquiry and memorization/coverage and that “The Scholar’s Soliloquy”-with its irony and humour- is indeed still relevant for our professional reflection.

22. Bibliography: • "Romancing The Child" by E. D. Hirsch Jr., Education Matters, Spring 2001. • http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_3_defense_memorization.html • http://concretekax.blogspot.ca/2009/07/is-rote-memorization-20th-century-skill.html • http://voiced.ca/?p=1668 • Fad, Fraud, and Folly in Education by Martin A. Kozloff, University of North Carolina, Wilmington, November 2002.