Constructivist Teacher Education

Building a World of New Understandings

Virginia Richardson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135715069
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

bringing together issues of theory, research and practice in constructivist teacher education, this book raises the questions and offers answers as to how does one persuade students and teachers to change their fundamental beliefs and practices about teaching and learning.

II: Research and Practice

4: Constructivism in Teacher Education: Applying Cognitive Theory to Teacher Learning

Nancy Winitzky and Don Kauchak

Introduction

The central mission of this volume is to draw appropriate applications from constructivism to the practice of teacher education. The essence of constructivism is the learners’ knowledge-building process (Derry, in press; Fosnot, 1996). Understanding knowledge acquisition therefore seems to be a central task for those attempting to define the role of constructivism in teacher education. As a result, key questions guiding our own research agenda for the past several years have been:

1. what does teacher candidate knowledge growth look like?
2. what is the relationship between this knowledge growth and program experiences?

This chapter describes our attempts to document how teachers construct knowledge, to understand this knowledge growth within a constructivist theoretical perspective, and to apply these findings in refining and redesigning teacher education programs.

The Place of Knowledge in Teacher Education

Despite the centrality of knowledge in both cognitive (Shuell, 1996) and constructivist (Derry, in press) views of learning, the importance of knowledge in teacher education is controversial. Under challenge is the applicability of theoretical knowledge to the complex and everyday practical concerns of teachers. Kessels and Korthagen (1996), for example, dispute the relevance to teacher education of abstract knowledge derived from systematic research on classrooms. They argue that the problem with such knowledge is that it is universal, and that the type of knowledge needed to be a good teacher is knowledge of particular situations and contexts. Kessels and Korthagen define universal knowledge as

propositional; i.e., it consists of a set of assertions that can be explained, investigated, transmitted, and the like. These assertions are of a general nature; they apply to many different situations and problems… Consequently, they are formulated in abstract terms. (p. 18)

They claim that such knowledge is not particularly useful to teachers, and that practical knowledge, that is, ‘…understanding of specific concrete cases and complex or ambiguous situations’ (p. 19) is preferable. In their view the problems with universal knowledge are threefold. First, it must be moderated by practical, contextual knowledge in order to be applied in any given specific situation. The implication is that universal knowledge is rendered superfluous by the need for practical knowledge of a particular context.

A second, related problem with universal knowledge according to Kessels and Korthagen is that in any given context, the particulars of the case rule over principles. ‘All practical knowledge is context-related, allowing the contingent features of the case at hand to be, ultimately, authoritative over principle. This is, according to Aristotle, “why people who lack a grasp of general ideas are sometimes more effective in practice’” (p. 19). The argument is that because universal knowledge is at best secondary, it is therefore unimportant and even at times a hindrance. As the outsider at the Grateful Dead concert looking for the boss was told by a helpful Deadhead, ‘the situation is the boss’.

The final problem is in the different ways decisions based on the two types of knowledge can be justified. With scientific knowledge, justification derives from principles and explanatory models. An action can be judged right or wrong based on an evaluation of the relevant evidence. In contrast, the

ultimate appeal of…(practical knowledge) is not to principles, rules, theorems, or any conceptual knowledge…the appeal is to perceptions. For to be able to choose a form of behavior appropriate for the situation, one must above all be able to perceive and discriminate the relevant details. These cannot be transmitted in some general, abstract form. (p. 19)

While Kessels and Korthagen acknowledge that theoretical knowledge may be of some limited use, they argue that practical wisdom, i.e., detailed knowledge of the particulars of a situation, is vastly more important, and that’…practical choices cannot even in principle be completely captured in a system of universal rules’ (p. 19).

We do not agree with this view of knowledge. The mere fact that principles must be adapted in order to apply to particular situations doesn’t render them useless. One principle guiding our actions, for example, is to be honest, but honesty with a son or daughter would look very different from honesty with a professional acquaintance. It would be nonsense to abandon the principle just because we apply it differently from one context to another. By the same token, it would be nonsense to abandon principles of teaching and learning such as ‘authoritarian learning environments suppress intrinsic motivation’ just because the principle must be adapted in different ways in a first grade versus a college classroom or in a self-contained special education context versus an inclusive environment.

Further, even granting the proposition that principles come second to particulars (which we do not) does not mean principles have no place; secondary in no way implies irrelevant. For example, how could a teacher who had no knowledge of the relationship between motivation and learning environment create and maintain a democratic classroom learning community? Without such foundational knowledge, a beginning teacher has nothing but a wish and a prayer to guide her actions. Also, how might teacher candidates begin to understand which particular details of classroom situations were salient without some general guidance in what, where, and how to look?

Anderson, Reder, and Simon (1996) attacked the view that all learning is situational by illustrating the value and generalizability of well-learned abstract knowledge. For example, in one study of mathematics learning, abstract instruction enabled students to apply their knowledge to a novel problem while students taught the same information through a concrete method were unable to do so. The topic under study was algebra problems involving mixtures.

Some subjects were trained with pictures of the mixtures while other subjects were trained with abstract tabular representations that highlighted the underlying mathematical relationships. The abstract training group was able to transfer better to other kinds of problems that involved analogous mathematical relations. (Anderson, Reder and Simon, 1996, p. 8)

In another study, Biederman and Shiffrar (1987) examined the difficult task of sexing day-old chicks. Under an apprenticeship instructional format, people spend years acquiring this skill. In the study, however, novices were able to reach the level of experts after a mere twenty minutes of abstract instruction. In yet another context, hitting an object under water, abstract instruction focusing on knowledge of principles promoted learning more effectively than concrete, trial-and-error learning (Judd, 1908). Children practiced hitting a target twelve inches underwater, but only some of them were also taught abstract information about the refraction of light. Children in both groups performed equally well at hitting a target twelve inches under water. But in a follow-up test involving a target only four inches under water, the abstract instruction group did much better. Anderson, Reder, and Simon concluded that instruction that combines both the abstract and the concrete is optimal, noting that: This method is especially important when learning must be applied to a wide variety of (frequently unpredictable) future tasks’ (p. 9).

Other research in cognitive psychology also supports the value of abstract or propositional knowledge. In particular, how individuals organize this knowledge has special import. Individuals’ knowledge structures differ, and these differences influence perception, understanding, and memory, processes central to learning. For example, experts have been compared to novices in many domains. It has been found that experts have more organized knowledge structures than novices and that, as a result, they perceive, organize, and remember more details of a situation than novices (Bruning, Schraw and Ronning, 1995). Importantly, experts use the deep structure of their domain (i.e., abstract knowledge about principles) rather than the superficial features of a situation to solve a problem. These findings apply to children as well as adults; in one study, children who knew a great deal about spiders were able to understand and learn more new information about spiders than children whose initial knowledge was low (Pearson, Hansen and Gordon, 1979). Similar results have been found for teachers; expert teachers see and remember more details about classroom events than novices, and the details they remember are more significant in terms of teacher actions that can promote student learning (Berliner, 1994).

Cumulatively, the research on knowledge suggests that understanding of general principles provides a knowledge foundation that transfers to a variety of situations. Such knowledge contributes in critical ways to the ability of learners to understand, frame, and solve problems and to adapt the application of knowledge in novel ways to changing circumstances. Applied to teacher education, we argue that abstract knowledge derived from systematic research and theory on teaching and learning plays an important role in helping teacher candidates make sense of, and effectively teach within, complex learning environments. As such, it deserves a central place in programs of teacher education. Because this type of knowledge is so essential for teacher growth, we focus in our research on the development of abstract, conceptual knowledge in teacher candidates as they progress through our program.

Constructivism in Teacher Education

An essential companion task to documenting knowledge changes in teacher candidates is to link those changes to program experiences. As teacher educators, we want our research to inform and improve our own practice. But the link between learning and instruction is not simple. As argued by Richardson (this volume) and by Gelman (1994), constructivist principles of learning do not automatically engender principles of teaching. Learners construct meaning on their own terms no matter what teachers do. Whether a teacher lectures about the different types of bacteria or has students culture bacteria and create their own key, students still construct their own individual and often idiosyncratic meanings about bacteria under each instructional format. In this sense, it is impossible for a teacher to be anything other than a constructivist.

Constructivist theorists would maintain, however, that learning is better or more effective when teachers use constructivist teaching methods, like culturing and keying bacteria as opposed to lecturing about bacteria. Constructivist teaching typically involves more student-centered, active learning experiences, more student-student and student-teacher interaction, and more work with concrete materials and in solving realistic problems (Shuell, 1996). Nevertheless, students still create their own meanings based on the interaction of their prior knowledge with instruction, and the meanings they make may not be the ones the teacher had in mind, no matter how constructivist the instruction. ‘Learners can and do find interpretations that differ from those intended by experts’ (Gelman, 1994, p. 55). Teachers create constructivist learning experiences for students based necessarily on what they, the teachers, find salient. But what is salient to the teacher is not necessarily so to the learner.

That this is so in teacher education has been convincingly demonstrated by Holt-Reynolds (1992; 1994). She observed preservice classes and then asked teacher candidates what they understood about those classes. The professor she observed emphasized the importance of using active teaching methods, stressing that the student passivity inherent in the lecture method was not conducive to learning. The candidates readily agreed that active teaching was important and that student passivity negatively impacted learning. Unfortunately, in reaching this conclusion they redefined passivity, maintaining that motivated students are actually actively listening during a lecture. Holt-Reynolds concluded:

When preservice teachers believe that teaching well depends rather exclusively on making school work interesting, they reject as irrelevant parts of the course that focus on teaching students to use metacognitive strategies for reading to learn…When they believe that student effort is the salient factor contributing to success as a learner, they reject as irrelevent learning how to foster comprehension skills…When they believe all students will be like themselves—able learners a bit bored by school—they find little reason to learn how to analyze the demands inherent to subject matter texts…When they believe that teacher telling—lecturing—is a primary vehicle for communicating teacher’s enthusiasm for subject matter, they react negatively to ideas for cooperative learning. (Holt-Reynolds, 1994, p. 5)

Within teacher education, as well as in other domains, then, the link between teacher-designed learning environments and student outcomes is uncertain and unclear.

Constructivism, while eliciting considerable energy and dialogue at the theoretical level, still has significant gaps. Connections between teaching and learning are undeveloped. Because learners can create any number of meanings, intended or otherwise, out of the same learning experience, it is critical at this juncture to develop a ‘theory of supporting environments’, to use Gelman’s term. What isn’t clear is what aspects of instruction learners attend to and how they use these in tandem with their prior knowledge to construct meaning. Needed are theories of instruction based upon constructivist learning principles that describe optimal learning environments. Such theory tailored to teacher education would offer ways to combine theoretical and practical knowledge in effective ways and would thus minimize the problems of misconstruction that Holt-Reynolds revealed. To advance the development of a theory of supporting we need information on candidates’ prior knowledge, on their interpretations of program experiences, and on what they learn from these experiences. In the next section we present data gathered from candidates in our teacher education program that begin to address these issues. We then explore alternative theoretical orientations within the cognitive/constructivist paradigm that we’ve found useful in interpreting and understanding these data. Finally, we offer suggestions for further research and practice that grow out of this analysis.

Research Summary

Several themes have emerged from our research on teachers’ knowledge growth in recent years. These have developed from studies using a variety of designs and measures. For example, an experimental design was used to determine whether knowledge structures were alterable by instruction (Winitzky, 1989). Correlational designs using a variety of measures of cognitive structure were employed to explore the concurrent validity of those measures and to examine the relationship of cognitive structure with other important variables (Henderson, Winitzky and Kauchak, 1996; Winitzky, Kauchak and Kelly, 1994; Winitzky, 1992). Longitudinal designs using both quantitative and qualitative measures have been used to describe the process of knowledge growth in teaching (Winitzky, 1992; Winitzky and Kauchak, 1992, 1995a, 1995b; Winitzky et al., 1994).

Concept mapping has been our primary measurement tool. The collection of concept map data can be handled in two ways. Unstructured or free recall tasks provide subjects with a general topic, ask them to brainstorm terms, and to organize these into a concept map. In contrast, structured concept mapping provides subjects with a fixed list to draw upon and organize (McKeachie, 1987).

There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach. The unstructured method provides a picture of subjects’ individual and idiosyncratic views of a domain, but lost is the capacity to focus specifically on course or target concepts of particular interest to the researcher. In addition, because each subject’s map is unique, cross-subject comparisons are more difficult. On the other hand, the structured approach allows focused analysis and cross-subject comparisons, but is less useful for investigating individuals’ developing conceptualizations of the domain. To counteract the deficiencies of each, we have used both approaches.

In scoring concept maps, we have assessed both conceptual accuracy, or coherence, and structural complexity. The coherence score is based on judgments about the logical relationship between each superordinate-subordinate pair and each chunk in the map. (A chunk is a group of concepts linked together.) Structural complexity includes scoring the number of concepts and the depth and breadth of the map. In practice we have relied most heavily on measuring structural complexity, because for beginners, structural complexity is highly correlated with coherence (Winitzky et al., 1994). These scoring procedures have been validated by several researchers (Novak and Gowin, 1984; Roehler, Duffy, Conley, Herrmann and Johnson, 1988; Winitzky et al., 1994). In addition, we have assessed tur...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• I: Theory
• II: Research and Practice
• III: Practice, Research and Theory
• Notes on Contributors