David
I your response to Mike's post is interesting and in line with what I have
been reading. We are in the process of beginning to develop instructional
units for our International 5D consortium that exchanges undergraduates
between the EU and the US to participate in undergrad education. Some of
the undergrad courses we use may focus on CHAT, while others are intro ed
psy courses that focus on Piaget, LSV and others. Trying to identify video
and fieldnotes to contextualize each theory principles becomes an all
consutimg task. I went back and re-read some of Joseph Swab's work on
polyfocal conspectus. Briefly, he proposes taking material (video, case,
fieldnote) for the purpose of explaining the events. One applies each
theory to the event, followed by the next. The theories are never
intermingled. It does seem that students might tire from the same
material. On the other hand, the same material might enable them to
differentiate differences among theories. I am in the process of deciding
a direction.
Bill Blanton
>Thanks for forwarding the math learning/teaching fragment as an instance of
>creating a zoped. What's interesting for me is that the same interaction
>could be analyzed as an instance of constructivist pedagogy. (I'm referring
>here to strict psychological constructivism in the sense of Piaget, rather
>than the newer social constructivisms that often rely on Vygotsky as well
>as Piaget.) From a psychological constructivist perspective, the engine for
>conceptual development is the cognitive conflicts one encounters every day
>in the world when one's expectations for what should transpire in the world
>(stemming form one's current, immature, conceptions) don't mesh with one's
>experiences in the world. Thus, the constructivist teacher's role centers
>on orchestrating a task environment to provoke transformative experiences
>for the student. For constructivists, the student learns ONLY from their
>engagement in the world. They do not learn from their engagement with
>OTHER's ideas, as in a ZPD, except insofar as those ideas are translated
>into world experiences.
>
>In the fragment you forwarded (below), the teacher's interactions with the
>student could be interpreted along the lines of the following
>constructivist teaching method:
>
>1. Observe the student's difficulties and develop a hypothesis about the
>limitations of the student's current conceptions.
>
>In this case, the teacher suspects that the student has conceptual
>understandings about the relationship between subtraction and addition that
>he is not bringing to bear on the current problem.
>
>
>2. Develop a task environment for the student designed to produce
>experiences that will challenge the limitations of the student's current
>conceptions.
>
>In this case, the teacher's strategy is to simply remind the student to
>think about the meaning of subtraction by presenting a take-away situation
>using magic markers that is juxtaposed temporally with the missing addend
>situation the student is facing in his homework.
>
>
>3. Observe the student's response to the task environment and assess the
>success of the intervention. If it seems unsuccessful, go back and rethink
>the original hypothesis and/or the task environment you've created.
>
>In this case, the student's blank look convinces the teacher that the
>intervention has not been successful. The student's blank stare is analyzed
>as a problem with the task rather than the initial hypothesis. In
>particular, the take-away situation is seen as too remote from the missing
>addend problems the student is facing in his homework. The magic marker
>task is reformulated as a missing addend problem for which the student
>already possess a subtraction strategy. The teacher then successfully
>supported the student's making an analogy back to the homework difficulty.
>
>
>Any thoughts on why a sociocultural analysis might preferred to a
>constructivist analysis for this teaching/learning fragment?
>
>David
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