Constructivism, social constructivism and what teachers think they know about learning

This is something I have wanted to write about for a while, which is why I have made it the first post.  Specifically, it came to be when reading the book, The Knowledge Illusion.  It occurred to me how little we actually know about the things we think we know about. Sloman and Fernbach use examples such as a zipper and a toilet – do we really know how these things work?  When we stop to think about, they contend, we don’t.  I worked as a plumber for a number of years and I still couldn’t explain in an instant exactly how an S bend works to suction and siphon the water out. Anyway, during the book I started to think about all the things I thought I knew about, but didn’t, and one of those was constructivism. 

Many, if not all teachers learn about constructivism in their initial teacher education courses (ITE), usually during an Educational Psychology course, or something similar. I used to teach educational psychology and still didn’t fully understand the nature of constructivism or the controversy that surrounds the theory, especially in Christianity, which was a problem, considering I worked and taught at a Catholic institution.

Constructivism is understood in educational terms as a learning theory that based on the idea that people actively construct or make their own knowledge, and that reality is determined by your experiences as a learner.  This may ring a bell to many of us, as will the name Jean Piaget, often thought of as the father of cognitive constructivism. Piaget also popularised the notion of the four stages of development (1968), which is foundational in many EdPsych courses and which is likely the basis for the ideas of grades and stages in current western schooling systems, but more on that later.

Essentially, the theory says that learners use their previous knowledge and experiences to construct new meanings.  What this means is that learning is individualistic; the theory recognises that learners are different, have different experiences and knowledge from which to connect and learn new things. This makes sense to teachers and to students when they hear this – learning is contextual, it differs for everyone.  However, while this understanding is foundational in the theory, the theory goes well beyond this base understanding. 

Constructivism is actually a general term that denotes theories that focus the attention inward, in regards to knowledge, toward the subject in question, rather than outward towards the world. In other words, we must look to ourselves to create knowledge, as it is personal, rather than an objective truth about what exists. This is where it comes into contrast with Christian theology: God, in the Judeo-Christian tradition is all-knowing; God is the supreme Knower and therefore, at least in some ways, a theist believes in, at the very least, the possibility of an objective truth. Much has been written about the ways that constructivism and Judeo-Christian thought can be compatible, when looked at through an educational lens; however, the two, at their foundation, are seemingly incompatible. If God created everything, then He also created knowledge and therefore, one does not construct their own knowledge, they discover it. An objective truth, external to the individual, is counter to the idea that one creates their own knowledge.

Without going into too much detail, this revelation was brought to my attention during a job interview. When asked a question about learning, I referred to constructivist ways of knowing, and the interviewer, a theological philosopher, asked me to go deeper into my thoughts; he was trying to figure out if I actually knew what I was talking about: I did not.

In my research following that interview, I was talking with one of my PhD candidates, a nun and a teacher, and I asked her how she saw this debate between the incompatibility between constructivism and Catholicism, and she told me about constructionism, something I had heard of, but paid little attention to, because it was born out of constructivism.  I don’t want to make this post about various theories of learning, but essentially constructionism takes the premise of constructivism, but without all the epistemology, and pragmatises it into an idea that “people build knowledge most effectively when they are actively engaged in constructing things in the world” (MIT Media Lab, 2016).  This is still based on the premise that we construct our own knowledge, but focuses on the how, rather than the why.  

However, I digress, although the foundations of the theories are important, what is more important, at least to me and hopefully to you, is what we know and how we use constructivism in the classroom. So, I pose this question: Is constructivism really what you mean when you talk about teaching in a constructivist way or do you mean constructionism, or neither?  I propose neither, and here’s why.

Constructivism is a learning theory and many of us, whilst teaching, are not necessarily thinking about the ways in which our students are learning that information. Yes, we may think about this in the planning stage, hopefully we do, but in reality, when we are planning for student learning, we are not thinking about the premise of constructivism as a concept or theory, instead we are, usually, at least from my experience, thinking about student-centred teaching practices, which is not the same as constructivism. This is not to say that thinking in a constructivist way will not impact the nature of your teaching, it will and should, what I’m arguing is that most teachers are not thinking from a constructivist point of view when they say they are using constructivist teaching practices.

For the leading constructivist theorists Piaget, Vygotsky, and Freire, the approach to education is one in which learners actively create, interpret, and reorganise knowledge in individual ways, which means the teacher must have the perspective that they cannot impart knowledge on the students, rather the students build their own knowledge. But these ideas are misleading. Would a math teacher assert that there is no knowledge to be learned by students? Would the science teacher approach teaching from the perspective that the knowledge of science doesn’t exist, or that it only exists in the knower? No. The laws of physics and mathematics are knowable and need to be taught.  When science teachers talk about constructivist learning, are they really talking about constructionism, a theory, as mentioned previously, that adopts a more pragmatic view of constructivist principles, i.e. hands-on learning, rather than the principles of the theory of cognitive constructivism in learning?

This is not to say that some teachers don’t hold very strong views about constructivist learning theory and the nature of how students construct cognitive structures, but I would argue this is rare.  What most teachers know, or think they know, is that constructivism equates to student-centred learning approaches that favours what students already know, or think they know, and encourages them to ‘discover’ how new ideas fit in with what they already know through active learning. 

I will come back to this towards the end of the post, but let me move on briefly to what I think is even more problematic in this way of thinking, which is social constructivism. While Piaget’s view of constructivism is a personalised approach, in that the individual constructs their own knowledge through the formation of cognitive structures based on what they know and new information that they gather, social constructivism takes a different approach based on the same premise of the construction of knowledge but instead of personalising it, it prioritises the social interaction between teacher and student, through language, in the development of the cognitive structures of knowledge. In other words, Piaget and his constructivist views, were based on a child’s development of cognitive structures of ‘spontaneous concepts’, those concepts that occur naturally in the world – time, space, causality etc; whereas Vygotsky and his theory of social constructivism, which is more widely used in schools, is based on ‘scientific concepts’, those that have taken mankind millennia to uncover. For example, an eighth-grade science student is not going to spontaneously uncover the theory of relativity; instead, she needs to be taught that theory.  Once taught, then she will need to learn how that theory fits into to what she already knows, or what she already thought she knew, and thus creates or constructs new cognitive models by which to understand the nature of weight in space. Vygotsky is also known for his theory regarding the zone of proximal development, which many teachers would know or at least have heard of, and which makes perfect sense in our common conception of teaching. All too often these two ideas, the zone or proximal development and social constructivism are used together and/or interchangeably.  While they may be complementary, they should not be used interchangeably.

OK, so now I’ve provided a base understanding of constructivism and some of the inconsistencies between the epistemological theory and the educational (mis)interpretation of the theory and its application to learning, but who cares? No, seriously… WHO CARES?  Well that’s in part my point – no one cares about the theories and their applications, what we really want to get to is how and why teachers are (mis)using the idea in the classroom and what it means in the context of student learning. Well here’s my thesis: The ideas of constructivism and social constructivism have clouded teachers’ judgements on what good teaching can mean. Good teaching is that which prioritises the learner and how they can and want to learn.  We can maximise the potential of students’ learning by putting them at the forefront of our thinking. Are good learning and teaching the outcome of constructivism or social constructivism – no!  Efficient and effective learning stems from having high expectations of students and planning learning experiences that consider the ability level of the learner, the significance and relevance of the content to the learner and, most of all, the learner’s desire and curiosity to engage with the topic.

Understanding a learning theory is not necessarily important in the effectiveness of the learning of the child; however, misunderstanding a learning theory and attempting to adopt teaching practices that you think are manifest from a learning theory you misunderstand, in my opinion, can be disastrous to the learning process.

Let’s look at some examples that are familiar to many teachers.  First, let’s take the common primary school classroom.  Every primary school classroom I have gone into over the past ten years has been set up in such a way that the children sit in groups. This is in stark contrast to when I went to school, when almost all classrooms were set up in rows and columns and students sat apart from one another. The prevailing answer when I ask teachers about this is that students learn better in groups. When I prod deeper, some form of Vygotskian social constructivist theory pops up and the notion of higher achieving students helping other students learn. Herein lies the problem – the primary school classroom has transformed based on a misunderstood theory of social constructivism. This is not to say that there are not benefits of group learning nor that students shouldn’t sit in groups for any number of justifiable reasons, BUT as professional teachers, we should know and be able to correctly articulate what those reasons are. You want to teach students teamwork – wonderful! You want the students to learn respectful communication and compromise – fantastic! But to simply say: students learn better in groups, just isn’t correct.  Some students may learn better in groups and some may not, but the default has become we sit students in groups because they learn better. Surely as professional teachers we can do better than that.

Now, let’s take constructivism and the idea that student-centred learning is constructivist, which is a prevailing theory and could be correct, although, what this infers is that constructivism tells us how to teach, which it does not – it is a theory of how one learns. That aside, many, specifically in the sciences, will argue that experiments and the nature of learning science is inherently, or should inherently, be constructivist, insofar as students will learn by doing. But this again assumes that the theory manifests into student-centred teaching practices, which is not correct.  This is not to say that student-centred teaching practices should not be practiced, to the contrary, they should, but they should not be attributed to a theory of learning.

Whether the teacher can correctly identify the nature of constructivism or social constructivism or not, does not have much bearing on how s/he should or could teach students; however, when one is told or believes that these theories should guide teaching and the theories are misunderstood, this is a form of amateurism.  In other words, anyone can misunderstand and apply a theory incorrectly, but this should not be the default in well-educated, professional teachers in our classrooms.

I will close by stating that I am no expert on the theories of constructivism or social constructivism.  There are countless experts who have written on this who are much better placed to provide better, more in-depth and accurate explanations of the theories and their practical application in the classroom. What I have tried to do here is point out that teachers do not need to be theorists. Trying to understand and implement ideas based on complex epistemological theories of learning and knowing are not important when what you are really trying to do is maximise your students’ potential. Good teaching and effective teaching practices are those that elicit the best results from our students. If you want your students to learn in groups that is fine, but ask yourself why and don’t cop out by attributing teaching practices to theories you don’t particularly understand. We have far too many mediocre and poor teachers who do not appreciate, reflect on and appraise their impact on student learning, but instead think that their job is to teach and the students’ jobs are to learn. There is a symbiotic relationship between learning and teaching and the best teachers pay attention to what their students want to learn, how they want to learn and by planning learning experiences that are academically engaging, interesting, relevant and thoughtful of the student experience.  My advice: focus on those rather than some arbitrary theories that you don’t particularly understand or care about, and you’ll be on your way to maximising your students’ potential.

Useful readings to accompany the rant:

Bächtold Manuel (2013). What Do Students “Construct” According to Constructivism in Science Education? Res Sci Educ (2013) 43:2477–2496.

Gordon, Mordechai (2009) The misuses and effective uses of constructivist teaching, Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice, 15:6, 737-746.

Phillips, D. (1995). The good, the bad and the ugly: the many faces of constructivism. Educational Researcher, 24(7), 5–12.