Recommended Book: "Enquiring Teachers, Enquiring Learners: A Constructivist Approach to Learning" Catherine Twomey Fosnot

I've completed reading "Enquiring Teachers, Enquiring Learners." There are many notes I would like to share directly from the text, but they require too much context. I would need to copy entire chapters into this blog.

In brief summary, the book challenged teachers to reevaluate our pedagogy. It called for more in-depth study into 'how' children learn and 'how' teachers can identify and accommodate the varied cognitive levels and stages of our students. The author also provided examples and recommendations for mentorship programs to assist the "teacher-as-researcher" with inventing classroom practices that support students in claiming ownership for their learning.

I found this book at a library book sale, so it is slightly dated; published in 1989. That said, it is still a valuable read.

Breadth versus Depth in Institutions: Elementary and Secondary Institutions (pgs 122-123)

The focus on thinking is the result of criticism from many directions. Futurists, for example, assail the schools for teaching facts that will be outdated before they are forgotten by the children learning them. They suggest instead that schools teach learners to access, organize, analyze, and synthesize material, which will be available via computers at simply the touch of a fingertip.

. . .

DeBono (1986), Lateral Thinking: "constructive, generative, and organizing in nature" (1) breadth- making connections or correspondences between various alternatives (2) change- making transformations such as viewing the same thing from different perspectives 

Notes on Enquiring Teachers, Enquiring Learners: A Constructivist Approach

now reading.

Constructing a Pedagogy for Language Arts (p. 70)

David was nodding in agreement. "Yes," he commented. "It makes me realize the inadequacies of corrective spelling from a stage-5 perspective if the learner is at Stage-2. Instead, it seems the role of the teacher needs to involve, first, figuring out how the learner thinks; then, second, providing a challenge to encourage rethinking. You have to be the tug that expands the circle, but the supporter to help the upward shift."

Investigations and Reflections on Learning: Teachers As Epistemologists (p. 88)

Jack Lochhead (1977), at the University of Massachusetts, began a study of strategies used in problem solving. He simply gave college students some math problems to solve, and, as they were working, he asked them to explain their thinking outloud. He also asked questions about their thinking in order to understand more fully what they were doing. To his surprise, the subjects in his study thanked him after the session, remarking that they had learned a great deal of mathematics from him. He was astounded, since he had not attempted to teach anything! From that early work, he went on to study the effect of probing questions on learners and found evidence that simply asking learners to explain their thinking enabled them to advance to higher levels of understanding. It seems that asking questions about thinking causes people to think more. In contrast, leading questions by teachers usually result in a guessing game, with learners trying to figure out what the teacher wants. The learner's thinking moves away from the problem and focuses on the teacher."