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For centuries theorists
have puzzled over the question of how people learn. As teachers,
this is an important question to us.
If we understand how people learn
we can better help them to learn. There are many different ideas
(theories) about how people learn.
Reading about these theories can give us a range
of ideas which increases our overall understanding of the ways in
which people learn. One of the more recent theories of learning
is the social constructivist theory. This idea
was first described by a Russian educational theorist named Vygotsky.
What did Vygotsky say?
- Children learn and develop thinking skills
only by interacting with others more skilled than themselves.
- Children develop by taking part in activities
that are slightly more difficult than they can easily manage.
- We therefore need to extend children slightly
beyond what they are capable of doing on their own. (the time
during which they are doing this learning is called the zone of
proximal development.)
- Learning takes place through children reorganising
their thinking as they try new ways of thinking
- Transferring information to a child does not
achieve learning.
One question which arises from this is, 'how do
we know what a child is capable of, so that we can extend them slightly
beyond that point?'
This is where the role of diagnostic assessment
becomes important. Once we have assessed and 'diagnosed' what the
child is capable of, further learning must then happen through interaction
which stimulates the child to learn, and not through
presenting content and expecting the child to memorise or recite
it!
In this way of learning, we again see the value
of questions. Asking leading questions can help a child to make
sense of a problem. Simply telling answers won't develop the child's
thinking. We must lead the child into solving the problem for themselves.
In constructivist theory, this process of leading the learner step
by step is called 'scaffolding'.
In the everyday sense this word refers to the
temporary structure used for builders to stand on when they are
constructing a new building. The mental scaffolding provided
by the teacher is also temporary. The teacher mediates in order
to guide the learner to do what they need to do to complete the
building themselves.
As a teacher you need to do three things in
order to provide scaffolding for your learners:
- Ask questions: Open-ended
questions will stimulate the child to think of new possibilities.
Examples of such questions are: "What if you were to try
this?" or "Why not start somewhere else?"
or "What do you think will happen if..?"
- Be a model: Provide yourself
as a model for the learners to follow. This does not mean
you should do the task for learners, but rather give them an example
and talk through how they will do it.
- Give feedback: This is very
important, and involves much more than a comment such as 'well
done'. If the learner is progressing well then it is the educator's
role to extend them further, by asking them to think about what
more they could have done.
When you use group work in your classroom, you
can let learners be mediators. Children learn from each other
and with each other. They become responsible for their own
learning. You should encourage co-operative learning. You
present the task and the conditions under which it is to be carried
out. You then make learners aware of the desired outcomes
or goals so that they can work towards them. This has been described
as "highly disciplined goal-directed activitiy, not a free
wheeling sharing of ignorance".
Another theorist who explored the concept of mediated
learning was Rueven Feurerstein in Israel. He argued that
intelligence was not something fixed at birth but could be changed
and developed. His measurement for testing learning potential is
called "cognitive modifiability".
This terminology sounds unnecessarily complicated
but it simply refers to the learner's capacity to develop.
The factors affecting this development are:
- direct stimuli from the environment
and
- learning mediated by an agent.
In other words if a child is not talked
to and played with by their caregiver then their intellectual development
will be stunted.
For Feurerstein there are two types of
mediated learning experience (MLE)
- the transmission of knowledge and values
- the experiences which help the learner learn
better.
Feurerstein realized that a lot of children had
never been taught how to learn because their teachers were not mediating
learning, they were just providing information. The educator
in Feurerstein's model is not supposed to instruct but rather to
work alongside the learners so that they know how to organise information
in order for them to learn more effectively.
Feurerstein's concepts apply directly to those
of OBE and to project work, where the educator's role is one of
mediator and facilitator rather than instructor or provider of a
fountain of knowledge.
adapted from Steele, Thinking
in the Classroom, SACOL 1999
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