Constructivist Learning Design and Lesson Plan Format

George W. Gagnon, Jr. and Michelle Collay

From http://www.prainbow.com/cld/cldp.html

This brief overview above indicates how each of these six elements integrate and work as a whole, but all need further explanation:

1. Situation: What situation are you going to arrange for students to explain?

Give this situation a title and describe a process of solving problems, answering questions, creating metaphors, making decisions, drawing conclusions, or setting goals. This situation should include what you expect the students to do and how students will make their own meaning.

2. Groupings: There are two categories of groupings:


A. How are you going to make groupings of students; as a whole class, individuals, in collaborative thinking teams of two, three, four, five, six or more, and what process will you use to group them; counting off, chosing a color or piece of fruit, or similar clothing? This depends upon the situation you design and the materials you have available to you.

B. How are you going to arrange groupings of materials that students will use to explain the situation by physical modeling, graphically representing, numerically describing, or individually writing about their collective experience. How many sets of materials you have will often determine the numbers of student groups you will form.

3. Bridge: This is an initial activity intended to determine students' prior knowledge and to build a "bridge" between what they already know and what they might learn by explaining the situation. This might involve such things as giving them a simple problem to solve, having a whole class discussion, playing a game, or making lists. Sometimes this is best done before students are in groups and sometimes after they are grouped. You need to think about what is appropriate.

4. Questions: Questions could take place during each element of the Learning Design. What guiding questions will you use to introduce the situation, to arrange the groupings, to set up the bridge, to keep active learning going, to prompt exhibits, and to encourage reflections? You also need to anticipate questions from students and frame other questions to encourage them to explain their thinking and to support them in continuing to think for themselves.

5. Exhibit: This involves having students make an exhibit for others of whatever record they made to record their thinking as they were explaining the situation. This could include writing a description on cards and giving a verbal presentation, making a graph, chart, or other visual representation, acting out or role playing their impressions, constructing a physical representation with models, and making a video tape, photographs, or audio tape for display.

6. Reflections: These are the students' reflections of what they thought about while explaining the situation and then saw the exhibits from others. They would include what students remember from their thought process about feelings in their spirit, images in their imagination, and languages in their internal dialogue. What attitudes, skills, and concepts will students take out the door? What did students learn today that they won't forget tomorrow? What did they know before; what did they want to know; and what did they learn?

Educational Precedents

Each of these six elements of our constructivist learning design has educational precedents. The following overview provides brief references to theoretical ancestors which support including these elements in organizing for learning:
• Situations : The work of Duckworth (1987) describes situations to engage students in having their own wonderful ideas about science, Steffe and Ambrosio (1995) use situations for students to explain in math, and Fosnot (1996) provides similar examples from writing and art.
• Groupings: Schmuck and Schmuck (1988) introduced group process dynamics to classrooms, and heterogeneous groupings are common to the cooperative learning work of Johnson and Johnson (1975) or Slavin (1980a). The materials category is often included in lesson plans.
• Bridge: This has some grounding in the set induction described by Gagne (1970), the anticipatory set of Madeline Hunter (1982) and the advanced organizer of Ausubel (1978).
• Questions: There is precedence in Bloom's (1956) taxonomy of educational objectives in the cognitive domain which led to higher level thinking questions, Sanders' (1966) work on kinds of classroom questions, and Flanders' (1970) work describing classroom questioning strategies.
• Exhibit: The work of Theodore Sizer (1973) and the coalition for essential schools includes an exhibition as part of the learning process. The passages of the Jefferson County Open School in Colorado and the validations of the St. Paul Open School in Minnesota put into practice authentic assessment approaches from a variety of sources including Wiggins (1995). Documentation from Engel (1994), portfolios from Carini (1986), and alternative assessment from the North Dakota Study Group on Evaluation led by Perrone (1988) encouraged teachers to move from testing memorization of information to demonstration of student learning.
• Reflections: We see earlier work in Hunter's (1982) description of "transfer," the work of Schon (1987) about reflective practice of teachers, which also applies to student learning, reflection about learning through journaling as described by Cooper (1991), and Brookfield's (1986) work on critical reflection. These precedents provide a theoretical framework for a constructivist learning design.

Assessment

Assessment becomes an integral part of every step in this learning design. Teachers design the situation based on their assessment of students' learning approaches, interests, and needs. Teachers design a process for groupings based on their assessment of materials of available and desired mixture of students. Teachers design a simple assessment of what students already know as a bridge to what they want students to learn. Teachers design questions to assess student understanding of the concepts, skills, or attitudes they are trying to learn. Teachers arrange an exhibit for students to record what they thought and submit it to others for assessment. Teachers arrange for reflections about what students' have learned and their internal process of representations as a context for self-assessment of individual learning.

Applications

The planning approach we are proposing is based on actively engaging students in situations that involve collaboratively considering their own explanations for phenomena, resolutions to problems, or formulation of questions. Students are asked to actively construct their own knowledge by making meaning out of the situation by themselves with support and guidance from the teacher. Teachers organize the situation and then provide encouragement and questions to groups of students who are trying to construct and to display their own explanations. For example, composition teachers might ask students to construct the simplest sentences and compare structures, literature teachers might ask students to explain the motives of a character, social studies teachers might ask students to assume the roles of two adversaries in a meeting, science teachers might demonstrate a phenomenon and ask students to explain what was observed, math teachers might ask students to find examples of sloping lines in the world around them and then introduce grids to determine equations, language teachers might engage students in conversational immersion without resorting to English translations, art teachers might ask students to transform clay with their hands without looking at it, music teachers might ask students to identify rhythms in a piece of music using their own annotations. The constructivist approach can be adapted to any subject area or curriculum by involving students as active participants in making meaning instead of passive recipients of information given to them by the teacher. This approach can be incorporated into 45 or 50 minute class periods to teach a particular concept, skill, or attitude.

When referring to student learning we deliberately use the phrase "concepts, skills, and attitudes" to convey different dimensions of knowledge. The accepted educational language described by current NCATE accreditation standards is "knowledge, skills, and attitudes." This implies that skills and attitudes are something different than knowledge or that knowledge is merely a collection of facts or information. Perhaps some of the confusion derives from Bloom's (1956) taxonomy of objectives starting with knowledge and proceeding through comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Again, this language is accepted as a standard in the education curriculum. Bloom later classified objectives in the affective domain and the psychomotor domain as well as in the cognitive domain. This left us with the legacy of knowledge as separate from what we can do with it or how we feel about it. We would argue that what Bloom has labeled knowledge is really information and that the other levels are different ways that learners construct knowledge for themselves and may not be discreet and hierarchical as Bloom suggests. However, these classifications can serve as an important guidelines for moving beyond recitation of information as the goal of education. We contend that an understanding of education should begin with epistemology rather than relegating it to the province of philosophy as an academic pursuit. Constructivist learning implies an initial concern with what knowledge is and how knowledge is actively constructed by the learner. Advocates of constructivism agree that acquiring knowledge or knowing is an active process of constructing understanding rather than the passive receipt of information.

1. Situation (you arrange for the students to explain.)

2. Groupings (of students and materials.)

3. Bridge (between what students know and what they might learn.)

4. Questions (you will ask or anticipate students will ask.)

5. Exhibit (of student explanations for others to understand.)

6. Reflections (by students on their process of explanation.)

2.

Here is a constructivist lesson plan  format

line

line

line

line

line

line

line

line

line

line

line

line

line