Welcome. So this is a course on Constructivisim, and so I think obviously a good question to ask initially is, what is constructivism? I'm sure that many of you have heard of this term. Some of you may think of it as a teaching approach, which I hope by the end of the course you will realize it is not a teaching approach, but if it's not a teaching approach, what is it? To answer that question, I'd like to ask a question, to begin with. That question is, well, let me setup the clip if you will, in Illinois where I live, in the summer it's hot in the winter it's cold, and why is that the case? In other words, what causes the seasons? So I'd like you to take a moment to write down your ideas in the provided text box and when you come back we'll continue. Welcome back. So hopefully, you've had a chance to write down some thoughts about what causes the seasons. When I do this with my students in a face-to-face class we often have a discussion that can go for 20 minutes to half an hour. It's a fairly complex topic with a lot of students' drawing on their ideas. One idea that often comes up, is that the seasons are caused by the distance of the Earth from the Sun. Now, this is a very intuitive idea. It makes lot of sense if I go closer to a heat source. I can feel the heat source more. If I'm further away from the heat source, I can feel the heat source less and so it makes sense that, if I were to be closer to the sun it would be summer and further away from the sun it would be winter. But, while this is a very reasonable and intuitive answer, there are some problems with it. One of those problems is that, while many times students think that the orbit of the Earth is an ellipse, such that the Earth is closer to the sun in the summer and further away from the sun in the winter, the orbit of the Earth is actually pretty much circular. So that there's very little difference in terms of how close the Earth is to the sun. Now, actually in the northern hemisphere, the Earth is even slightly closer to the Earth in the winter. So the distance from the Earth would not be a causal factor for the seasons. Another issue with that view is that as you all probably know, when it's summer in the Northern hemisphere, it's winter in the southern hemisphere, and if the earth were fully closer to the sun, it would be summer all over the Earth, if the earth were further away from the sun it would be winter all over the earth and it's clearly known. Very briefly, and I would encourage you to discuss this with your classmates and to perhaps even look up some some explanations online, but very briefly, as you can see, when the Earth is tilted toward the Sun, the sun is shining more directly on the northern hemisphere and more obliquely on the southern hemisphere and so the sunlight is much more intense in the northern hemisphere in the summer and much less intense in the southern hemisphere in the winter. But, if some of your ideas involved distance, you're in very good company. In the 1980s, there was a group that decided to go and interview students at Harvard graduation. They interviewed a number of students in faculty at Harvard graduation and they asked them this question, what causes the seasons, and another question, what causes the phases of the Moon. What they found was that, many students articulated this exact idea, that it's summer when the Earth is closer to the sun, and winter when the Earth is further away from the sun. Some of them talked about having taken physics of planetary motion and other advanced courses and certainly all of them have considered this idea in their early education. They are Harvard graduates. They have some of the best education in the world. So this was a demonstration, very impactful demonstration of what a lot of the research had been showing that even with very good education, many students are not learning basic conceptual ideas in mathematics and science. So this was a sent to shock waves through the science education community. So we know that students struggle with many stem Ideas, Science Technology Engineering, and Mathematics, as well as ideas in other areas. So I think a very reasonable question to ask is, what can I do as a teacher to get these ideas across more clearly? I think it shows a real concern on the part of the teacher for their students. I think it rests on a couple of problematic assumptions at least problematic from a constructivist perspective. The first assumption is that my focus should be what I do as a teacher, and this is reinforced by many professional development meetings, where a professional develop person will come in and say, in order to teach better, you should do X, Y and Z. A second assumption, is that I can get ideas across. Both of these assumptions are very strongly questioned by a constructivist perspective on learning. Let's look at these assumptions individually. The first assumption that my focus should be on what I do is a teacher. To discuss this, I want to talk about another situation that of driving. What should my focus be as I drive? Now, imagine yourself in a car and someone is driving, and they're staring at their steering wheel, or they're staring at their feet, or staring at the shift. How would you feel? I would feel very uncomfortable. When someone is driving, I want them to be focusing on the road. With all of these, other actions in-service of staying on the road, avoiding accidents, taking the turns to get where they want to go etc. I would argue that similarly from a constructivist perspective, that as a teacher, my focus should be on my students in their ideas rather than on my own actions as a teacher. Another part of this video, the Private Universe video that I talked about earlier was looking at teachers observing their students as they are interviewed by the project staff, and the teacher would sit there on a closed-circuit monitor of their students being interviewed, and one of the teachers said, when one of her students was talking about some very misconceived ideas about topics that she had already taught. She said this is mind-boggling, and here's a student who like the Harvard graduates, is one of the top students, but the students still have very strong conceptual difficulties with a lot of the material. So teachers, if they're if they're just focusing on their own actions, which is pretty much what they've been trained to do, they're not focusing on their students ideas and they can be blown away by just a very simple question that reveals this huge iceberg of ideas beneath the visible behaviors that they've seen. The second assumption is that, I can get ideas across, and in order to explore this idea, I'd like to tell a story. This was a number of years ago, when my son was, he's now an adult, but he was about four or five at the time. I showed him a typewriter and they were antiquated even at that time. We'd gone so much to computers, but I showed them a typewriter that I had used in college. I'm dating myself. So I took a piece of paper, I put it into the typewriter, I turned the knob, and it came up on the other side of the roll. My son looked at me and said where does the other piece of paper come from? Now, he had seen a piece of paper go into the typewriter and what looks like a different piece of paper come out of the typewriter. So I thought I gave him an excellent explanation. I actually took his arm and I said now what happens is that the piece of paper goes down on one side of your arm and it's comes up the same piece of paper is coming up on the other side of your arm. He looked at me and said, but where does the other piece of paper come from? So it wasn't that I couldn't give him an explanation that he could make sense of, that he was able to assimilate into his own ideas. So thinking about this, the driving example and the typewriter example, I'd like to revise these assumptions to some constructivism assumptions. So the first one rather than my focus being on myself as a teacher, my focus should be on my students and their ideas, and the second assumption rather than the idea that I can get ideas across, I can't get ideas across, but I can help my students engage and modify their ideas. So in the upcoming lectures, we'll be looking more deeply at these two assumptions. The first assumption, that my focus should be on what I do is the teacher and the constructivist reframing of that that my focus should be on my students and their ideas. The second assumption, that I can get ideas across and the constructivist reframing that I can't get ideas across, but I can't help my students engage and modify their ideas. So those two assumptions will be examined more closely in the next two lectures.
