yes – try googling it, also google Vygotsky.

What research can you cite? Because I have been reading the research, too and that is not what I’ve read.

thanks!

Completely agree with Melissa Taylor! Constructivist method – that is the proper way for our children to be tought. They should learn a new subject through the lens of their own understanding the matter, analysing it, comprehension and making their own conclusions.

Hi Melissa, Payal, Brian etc,
A friend shared this post on his facebook page and I was eager to dig into this community as part of my research on a project I’m doing to complete my studies at the California Institute for Integral Studies. Let me situate myself in the conversation:
I went to Montessori school through 5th year, public school 6-8th grade, private boarding school at Choate Rosemary Hall through high school and several arts conservatories for theater before finding myself at CIIS. My cohort at CIIS is actively engaged in the exploration of different epistemologies. One might argue that the very nature of that exploration is constructivist but I’d request we go deeper.
Regarding Brian’s comments below as well as Payal’s above, I am concerned with the idea that parents may easily come away from this article with a “construcivist learning is the best” assessment. I am not convinced there is any “best” but more than that, to say so simply by making the side by side comparisons you offer is, perhaps, a precariously reductionist approach between what Freire calls the “banking system of education” and what you are calling constructivism.
I believe everyone has a different way of learning. The subtleties of privilege, of gender roles, of family dynamics, of media all may contribute to different ways different people succeed in building knowledge. This might be a critical theoretical approach to evaluating the article, but I do not think it is overly academic to offer the idea that there are many ways to approach ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies. Daunting, perhaps, but if we’re going to work from the big picture inwards, we need to take a big picture approach.
I suggest a dip into the works of Egon Guba and Yvonna Lincoln who write on Competing Paradigms in Qualitative Research of the four primary alternative inquiry paradigms, “Positivism, Postpositivism, Critical Theory et al, and Constructivism.” (Guba and Lincoln, 2004, Handbook of Qualitative Theories and Issues)
It would be a lot to go into here, as the chapter I refer to is, yes, extremely thick. My point is this: let’s be careful with our language. We fall easily into this is good, that is bad. This is the best, that is the worst. Learning isn’t a binary conversation unless we’re going to stay in the right/wrong model. Though many of the visionaries we’re noting may claim their approach is the best, it would be impossible for them all to be right. I may feel emphatically that making up a song about math is the best way for me to learn how to add. You may think that’s ridiculous and prefer to count beads. Which one of us has the best approach for students? What if students were offered conversations and experiences in many modes of inquiry and stimulated their minds in a variety of ways that not only encouraged construction of knowledge but also a broadened understanding of their peers?
I know I have grown significantly, even as a 30 year old man, by engaging in conversations with my co-learners not only about what we’re learning but how we’re doing it. This conversation is not just for parents. It’s for everyone.