Constructivism is discussed to a large extent but practiced less. In my college of education we have humbly started to use this approach. Education colleges should now prepare facilitators who have understood changed role of teacher. But habit of teaching for so many years is a hurdle in changing mind set. Besides that the availability of learning material to the students for taking initiative in learning is also a limitation. This becomes true in case of Marathi medium students. 

April 10, 2009

There are many misconceptions about teaching. Most of us think that mere telling is enough for communicating. But you cannot guarantee learning by merely listening. One has to be there physically as well as mentally to understand something. Besides that unless one finds out relationships among various content points he/she cannot understand throughly. This is exactly expected in constructivism, understanding the structure of the content.

April 6, 2009
I have tried constructivism while teaching educational psychology to student teachers in my class. While dealing with the topic information processing model, student teachers were asked to do some activites and present the results. The class then discussed the results and generalised some important principles.
The activities are given below-
1. comparing retention of meaningful and meaningless material
2. comparing retention of grouped and ungrouped content
3. taking quick survey of news from news paper that are attended by various persons, and reasons for attending
4. how persons prepare summaries of the content they have learnt and comparison of the key terms identified by each person and the organisations each one has used
5 what tricks people are using to memorise complex material
 

costructivism in learning teaching

Date April 2, 2009
Dear teachers,
We all are interested in improving quality of esducation. One important way is to improve learning teaching process in schools. Most of the teachers use traditional approach which is teacher dominated and content oriented. But now there should be change in the process. If students are to be prepared for 21st century, they need to develop learning skills, cooperation, and self confidence. This can be obntained through using constructivism. Constructivistic approach provides scope for inductive thinking, self learning and hypotheses testing through interactions with peers, teachers and also learning material. I think we teachers need to work more on this concept, try to understand methods to make students learn by themselves and change our traditional role as a teacher.