Learning In Theory And Practice: Investigating The Applicability Of Constructivism In An Early Years Esl Classroom

This essay will discuss constructivism in the context of an early years ESL classroom. The definition and origins of constructivism will be looked at in the first section of this essay. With the basic overview of constructivist theory established, the next section will examine two different versions of constructivism in more detail. Here, two prominent scholars of constructivism, Vygotsky and Piaget, will be delved into, highlighting the distinctions and nuances between the different schools of thought. With all that in place, the third section of the essay will use examples from my own experience to explore constructivist theory. The sub-questions that inform this essay are:

1) In terms of practicality, is having students totally direct their own learning a viable teaching strategy in a real classroom?

2) Is constructivism an effective or useful way of helping students learn more effectively?

I will choose vignettes that highlight important constructivist ideas and to what degree they are helpful in analysing my own practice in order to bring more effective teaching methods to my students and better serve their needs.

What is constructivism?

Beginning this essay by tackling the meaning of constructivism itself, it seems sensible to locate constructivism in the context from which it sprang in order to explain why it was developed and how the intellectual milieu at the time impacted its evolution.

Beginning with Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, Pavlov s research showed that dogs could be taught to salivate at the ringing of a bell because they began to associate the bell with food (Windholz 1995). This idea of stimulus reinforcement was central to learning theory at the time. Pavlov s work in the early 20th century caught the attention of many prominent scholars who attempted to build off Pavlov s work through the discovery of general laws of learning in the same way that physicists had done with physical reality (Wood, 1998). This reinforcement idea was taken up most notably by B. F. Skinner who showed that the best way for animals to learn a behaviour was not to reinforce it every time but instead reward the behaviour randomly. Skinner wanted to train rats to press a lever and he discovered that the most effective way to do that was to reward the rat in a random pattern (Parot, 2001). Skinner thought that knowledge came from the outside and was a rigid procedural approach, aimed at using fixed stimuli and reinforcements to promote a fixed world of objective knowledge, measured primarily in terms of observable behavior (Hassad, 2011, p. 3).

This method of explaining learning and behaviour as simply a response to environmental stimuli remained orthodox for many years. In the 1960 s this belief, that learning should be studied through objective phenomena like the other sciences, began to decline (Applefield, Huber, and Moallem, 2000). New concepts began to be explored in the hope of making progress and constructivism as a theory grew out of this intellectual soil (Wood, 1998).

One of the prominent thinkers in this new wave of thinking was Jean Piaget. Piaget believed, in contrast to the behaviourist pedagogy of Skinner, that learners construct new knowledge from the knowledge they already possess. Constructivism describes a bottom-up, student driven process of learning whereby learners progress from the simple to the complex, and teachers, as Fosnot states, act as facilitators, provocateurs and questioners (2005, p. 13). The next section investigates two different varieties of constructivism in order to bring a more nuanced understanding of the theory into my reflections on my own practice.

Constructivism under the microscope

Learning is an extremely complex and often mysterious phenomenon. As such, it is no surprise that different constructivists have emphasised different methods and approaches. Looking more closely into the distinctions will allow for a clearer picture of the landscape of ideas and will enable a more thorough dissection and analysis of my own practice.

The first school of thought to examine is Piagetian constructivism. It is important to note that Piaget was not, and did not consider himself to be, an educational theorist (Voyat, 1981). He was a developmental psychologist whose insights and research had obvious connections to educational theory. Piaget ran experiments to investigate how children learn about the world and one of his main insights was that children learn by constructing knowledge from what they already understand (Garhart, 2013). He believed understanding and learning was mostly an individual process which took place within each child s mind (Feldman, 2004). The contention ran that as children grew older, they gathered more information about reality and built new systems of more complex understanding on top of the more simplified models of the world they had already constructed (Piaget, 1955).

This individualistic form of the construction of knowledge was challenged by Soviet psychologist, Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky proposed a simple thought experiment. He asks you to imagine two children, both of them ten years old and both of them able to succeed in tasks designed for ten year olds. He suggests most people would assume the two children are the same mentally. Now he asks to imagine an adult giving help to both children and with this aid, one child can complete tasks designed for a twelve year old child and the other child remains at the ten year old level, even with the adult help. It is for this reason that Vygotsky asks us to reconsider our judgement concerning the ability of both the children (Vygotsky, 1994). Vygotsky referred to this concept that people can perform tasks in conjunction with each other that they would not be able to do alone, as the Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, 1978). This idea, that knowledge is partly socially constructed (Daniels, 2001), and that multiple minds can be networked into a whole greater than the sum of its parts, is something that set Vygotsky`s version of constructionism apart (Daniels, 2005 Derry, 2013).

Reflective practice

Now those constructivist perspectives have been outlined, I will take a reflective look at my own practice and examine my experiences through constructivist lenses. My aim is to assess how applicable the different variations of constructivism are to an early years ESL classroom.

Experience one

The first experience concerns my high level kindergarten (K11) class where all the students are between 5-6 years old. We had just completed some speaking activities regarding simple addition and subtraction and then moved onto a worksheet with various sums. The sums were written in standard mathematical numerical notation e.g. 7+3=. Some of my students immediately set to work answering the questions and it was obvious they had seen these kinds of problems before and felt confident in solving them alone. However, some of my students struggled to begin problem solving. One girl in particular, Emma 6, was at an interesting stage of inability. She could recognise the numbers and symbols in the sum, understand what addition was and that she needed to find the sum of the two given values but she could not make that final leap to solve the problem. I asked her to make checkmarks above each value and simply count all of them. This method seemed to work and she continued successfully with her sums.

Interestingly however, once Emma managed to successfully complete a variety of additions using the counting the checkmark methods, she was initially unable to transfer this knowledge over to subtraction problems. This seemed to contradict Piaget s theory on the reversibility of operations (Piaget, 1963). Piaget states that once a child understands the operation of addition, she will implicitly know how to separate those two values again, although this was not the case for Emma (Piaget, 1963). Emma found it difficult to complete the subtraction problems because she was left to work it out on her own and she did not use the counting method suggested to her. When alone she tried to do the subtraction in her head and could not accurately find the answer, although when I asked her to make the check marks for each number and physically count them she succeeded.

It is not entirely convincing that understanding addition automatically confers the ability to subtract but it does seem reasonable to posit that knowledge of addition is a prerequisite to understanding subtraction, at best the two concepts appear to be ambiguously connected (Lourenco, 1996). In this case it appears that Emma was not able to use the knowledge she already had in counting checkmarks and leverage that information into subtracting checkmarks. The reason for this may be that she might not have been comfortable enough with addition to adequately reverse the operation in her own mind. In defending his argument of the reversibility of operation perhaps Piaget would have argued that Emma had not sufficiently mastered addition and therefore could not reverse something she was not comfortable doing in the first place. Although, this reasoning seems circular because it is sneaking in the ability to reverse the operation into the ability to do the operation in the forwards motion and it is possibly strawmanning Piaget s real opinion on this case.

Experience two

The second experience I wish to relate also took place in a kindergarten class. The aim of the lesson was to introduce the concept of flying animals and to give students the chance to practice speaking in English about the differences between flying and non-flying animals. This lesson was situated in a larger topic about animals where we investigated animal appearance, behaviour and abilities. We had been working on this topic for 8 hours of classes already so the students were able to talk competently about the differences between animals.

I wanted to engage the students on their terms so I brought in many different toy animals with which the students were familiar, namely lizards, owls, fish, monkeys, chickens, dinosaurs and bees. I began by asking the students what the differences between any two animals were and received a range of answers:

Lizard has leg, fish no leg

Fish swimming, owl not swim

The dinosaur is very big, chicken is small

The students clearly could demonstrate knowledge about the differences between animals using the language they had studied and could voice that knowledge in English. However, I began to get concerned because they were not reacting exactly how I wanted them to. I had envisioned one of them noticing that some of the animals could fly, because I knew they had encountered that verb before, but none of them said anything about flying. This was a problem because all my lesson materials were prepared for a lesson about flying animals and I wanted the students to stumble onto the topic without pushing them into it. As time and patience were running out I pointed at the owl s outstretched wings and asked what they were and what the owl was doing. Some students responded by saying the owl had wings and it was flying but the majority asked where the owl was going, or saying that it had stripes and was big. Clearly, the students were not that interested in the flying aspect of the owl so I resorted to sorting through the animal models one by one into aerial and non-aerial piles while repeating the language I wanted the students to learn.

A popular principle among constructivist teachers is that lessons should be framed with an initial question that piques student interest and energises them to engage with the rest of the lesson (Brooks and Brooks, 1999 Furth and Wachs, 1975). On the surface this seems like a neat and deft way of getting students interested in the topic but in a real classroom, it does not always unfold as the theorists imagine. It is not clear from the literature what a teacher is supposed to do if the students are not motivated or interested in the topic at that time. A logical next step would be to try another angle of approach and to think of another entry point for the students in order to engage them in the topic (Prawat, 1992). However, this can be very difficult, particularly for young learners because it is harder to engage with them just through speaking about a topic, and this challenge is compounded further for very young students whose first language is not English because it is even harder to reach them through speech. As such, there is a reliance on other resources like models, videos, toys, songs or realia to get the students interested in a topic. This, however, comes with its own practical problems.

In my ESL centre teachers are not given permanent classrooms and instead share the rooms with their colleagues. This means that the classrooms are bare and all the materials are brought in by the teacher just before the lesson begins. As such, the teacher has to plan what to bring into the classroom and cannot simply let the children do all the choosing. This puts the constructivist minded teacher in the position of wanting the children to steer the lesson, and to have alternative entry methods into the topic but at the same time having to dictate the direction of the lesson because of the resource situation.

Perhaps the best way to mitigate this problem is to recognise that no teaching position is perfect and everything comes with limitations. It might not be ideal, from a learner s perspective, to force entry into a topic but understanding the constraints of a given situation and doing what is possible within that framework is a favourable approach on grounds that it is based in reality.

Experience three

The final experience I want to relate also took place in the high level kindergarten class discussed in experience one. The task was to match two halves of a written sentence together with a picture. For example, one piece of paper read he is and another read running and they had to match those two halves with another picture of a boy running. One student, David 5, was not able to understand the goal or devise a method of reaching that goal. I asked David what was happening in one of the pictures.

Running said David

What letter does running begin with?

R

That s right. Can you see the word running, it begins with an R?

Here? said David, picking up the square of paper that said running .

Good. Now, is the person in the picture a boy or a girl? I asked.

Boy said David.

OK then, do we say he or she ?

He David replied.

And what letter does he begin with?
H

Can you see the word he , it begins with an H ?

David quickly snatched the half of the sentence with he is written on it. For the next two sentences I followed the same pattern by asking David what was happening in the picture, followed by questions about the first sound of the gerund and pronoun and the relationship between those sounds and a letter. In this way David connected a few more sentences and pictures. I wanted David to internalise the process so after he had finished two sentences I began to withdraw my help. However, David got stuck at every intervening step if given no help whatsoever and I was unsuccessful in weaning him off supervision during that task. On the other hand, towards the end of the activity it became obvious that David was anticipating my questions because he would answer correctly before I could finish asking it. For example, when I asked:

and what letter does th

F David correctly interjected.

Using an approach inspired by the conversation analysis of Goodwin (2006) this suggests that David was beginning to understand the method behind the activity but was not yet confident enough in his own ability to complete the task without guidance. The concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is something that came up when reflecting on this experience. It was clear that David was unable to complete the task without assistance but, with prodding questions, was able to leverage the knowledge he had and bridge the gap.

Vygotsky wrote that when the child solves a problem [he] must make independent use of the results of the earlier collaboration (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 215-216). It seemed that David was using our previous exchanges as a model to follow but was not quite ready to make independent use of our interaction. The fact that David did not need to wait for my question to finish before answering it suggests that he was beginning to internally model and then transmute our conversation into intrapsychological speech, or inner speech , which, according to Vygotsky, is the beginning of individual thinking (Leont ev, 1981 Vygotsky, 1987).

Not everyone agrees with this formulation of a development from interpsychological speech to intrapsychological speech however. Some have suggested that Vygotsky may have drawn too sharp line between the social and the individual (Wells, 1999) and others have gone further in arguing that such a distinction does not make sense because learners do not simply passively absorb and then internalise knowledge from the outside (Lave and Wenger, 1991). Instead, Lave and Wenger argue, learners are active participants in the negotiation and renegotiation of meaning in the world. (1991). This line of thinking does seem reasonable up to a point, although not every external piece of knowledge is negotiable and sometimes it has to be taken as a conceptual whole by the learner for example, fire is hot, 2+2=4 and so on. This knowledge does not seem to require negotiation by learners and it is reasonable to suggest that other low level, foundational concepts can be taught through social interaction and then internalised wholesale by the learner.

If I were to repeat the interaction there are some aspects which I would have done differently in light of the reading I have done since. Realising that the task set was not actually for something was perhaps a mistake. Vygotsky argued that teaching should be organized in such a way that reading and writing are necessary for something. (1978, p. 117-118) There was no higher goal for the students to achieve except to match the sentences together properly, a style of reading and thinking that was severed from a real world context and instead became an isolated, abstracted task. It is not surprising that a young learner like David found it difficult and confusing.

Conclusion

After having looked back and reflected on these different experiences in class through a variety of constructivist lenses, both in theoretical and practical terms, there is much more work to do regarding its applicability in an early years ESL classroom. It seems that in terms of practicality, it is difficult to fully live up to constructivist ideals because of the emphasis on student directed learning. Sometimes, as the vignette with the animals showed, it is not always possible to allow the students true freedom to construct their own meaning and find their own interests in a lesson. The theoretical constraints are more difficult to assess. After a theory has been put to paper it becomes rigid and thus struggles to account for the blurred and messy reality of human life. The experiences shared in this essay hopefully illustrate some of the difficulty in determining how far it is possible to trust a theory in terms of understanding real life human children. It is probably unwise to use the various theories of constructivism as objective criteria to both increase and assess learning. Instead it perhaps more helpful to use constructionism as a heuristic that offers contingent insights into teaching and learning more effectively.

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