By Bryan Flaig: At John Gill Elementary, Redwood City School District’s STEAM school in Redwood City, first grade teacher, Joyce K, recently read an informational text to her 1st grade class on the theme of now and long ago. The text compared and contrasted devices people used in the 19th century with the devices we use today. When she finished reading, she asked students, “What items from our classroom would you want to take with you, if you could go back to an old, one-room schoolhouse?” The students were silent. “They just sat there on the carpet, staring at me,” she told me. “No one was talking.”
Joyce had an idea. She had been using making activities in her classroom this year, to help students explain their thinking around plot, scene descriptions, and characters. She went to the back of her room, grabbed several empty cardboard boxes and brought them back to the carpet. “Let’s take some boxes and make our own old one-room schoolhouses,” she told the class. “Go to your tables and make objects that you want to put inside your schoolhouse.”
The students went back to their desks and started cutting up paper and small pieces of cardboard. They folded and colored and taped. Joyce circulated around the room and asked students, as they dropped in their items, “What do you want to take to the old one-room schoolhouse?”
“I want to take some paper,” a boy said. He dropped little bits of folded paper into his box. “They had to write on chalkboards, but I want to write on paper.”
Another boy said, “I want to take some folders so I can keep stuff in them.” He dropped a small piece of cardboard into his box.
At each table, students were adding items to their boxes, dropping in objects to represent iPads, backpacks, packets of colored markers, books, and desks. Each time, Joyce asked why they were dropping in their objects.
“It was so interesting to see what they were making and listening to their explanations,” she said. “They had no problems communicating their ideas when they were holding items in their hands.”
Seymour Papert said something very similar when he was describing how his constructionist ideas differed from the earlier constructivist theories of his mentor, Piaget.
We understand ‘constructionism’ as including, but going beyond, what Piaget would call ‘constructivism.’ The word with the V expresses the theory that knowledge is built by the learner, not supplied by the teacher. The word with the N expresses the further idea that this happens especially felicitously when the learner is engaged in the construction of something external or at least shareable … a sand castle, a machine, a computer program, a book. This leads us to a model using a cycle of internalization of what is outside, (and) then externalization of what is inside and so on.
From: Papert, S. A. (1990). Constructionist learning. In Idit Harel (Ed.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Media Laboratory.
The process of learning through sharing objects becomes a iterative process. Students hear the story (internal), make and share objects (external), explain their thinking, receive feedback from peers and teachers, and then internalize their understanding to edit or create new external objects to share. At each stage, some form of knowledge building is taking place, and (as Papert points out), more easily than processing the information by yourself.
What I enjoyed in hearing Joyce describe this activity to me was how well she had internalized Papert’s ideas without ever knowing who Papert was. She has that natural instinct that many good teachers possess of knowing what helps her students learn. She has gleaned an understanding of constructionism by doing making activities aligned to content and seeing how her students respond. I imagine that Papert would have been thrilled. Learning by doing was what he was all about, anyway.
Redwood City School District
