K to 12 Basic Education Curriculum
Constructivism In Mathematics Teaching
The 21st century classroom is filled with a vibrant
assortment of learners.
Students come from different types of socio-
economic backgrounds, with culturally experience,
and learning styles.
These dynamics create a challenge for teachers.
Teaching most always be adjusted to the level of the
pupils. So constructivist way of teaching be
promoted in the class room.
Meaning of constructivism
• Constructivism is a rather heterogeneous idea.
We invent our own concept and ideas, linked to
what we already know.
• This meaning making theory of learning is
called constructivism, knowledge is constructed
by learners through an active, mental process of
development; learners are the builders and
reactors of meaning and knowledge.
• According to Brader - Araje and Jones (2002) -
Constructivism can be defined as "the idea that
development of understanding requires the
learner to actively engage in meaning -making".
Varieties of constructivism
1. Educational constructivism
2. Philosophical constructivism
3. Sociological constructivism
Constructivism in Teaching
➢ Constructivism teaching is based on the belief
that learning occurs as learners are actively
involved in a process of meaning and knowledge
construction. Learners are the makers of
meaning and knowledge.
➢ Constructivism teaching fosters critical thinking
and creates motivated and independent learners
➢ Piaget (1977) - explains that, we accommodate
the new information to our old way of thinking
by restructuring our present knowledge to a
higher level of thinking.
o Constructivist teaching depends upon the
learner's level of cognitive.
▪ Sensory motor stage 0-2 years
▪ Pre-operational stage 2-7 years
▪ Concrete operational stage 7-11 years
▪ Formal operational stage 12-15 years
Activities In Constructivist Classroom
1. Experiments
2. Research project
3. Field trips
4. Films
5. Class Discussions
Role of Teachers
➢ In the constructivist classroom the teacher role is
to prompt and facilitate discussion.
➢ The teachers' main focus should be on guiding
students by asking questions, it will lead them to
develop their own conclusions on the subject
The Constructivist Classroom
➢ Three major roles for facilitators to support students
in constructivist learning environments are:
1. Modeling
2. Coaching
3. Scaffolding
➢ A constructivist classroom environment provides
opportunities for students to question the material
being presented and explore various topics as their
interests.
➢ The goal is to produce a democratic classroom
environment that provides meaningful learning
experiences for autonomous learners.
➢ In a constructivist classroom, by contrast the teacher
and the student share responsibility and decision
making and demonstrate mutual respect.
Benefits of Constructivism in Teaching
 Children learn more and enjoy learning
 Promote divergent thinking
 Education works best when it concentrates on
thinking and understanding rather than on rote
memorization.
 Boost the confidence of learners
 Constructivism concentrates on how to think and
Understand
 Promote collaborative learning
 Constructivism gives students ownership of what
they learn, since learning is based on students.
 Engaging the creative instincts develops student's
abilities to Express knowledge through a variety of
ways.
 Constructivism promotes social and communication
skills by creating a classroom environment that
emphasizes.
Characteristics of constructivist Teaching
➢ According to Audrey Gray, the characteristics of a
Constructivist classroom are as follows:
▪ The learners are actively involved
▪ The environment is democratic
▪ The activities are interactive and student
centered
▪ The teacher facilitates a process of learning
in which students are encouraged to be
responsible and autonomous
Principles of constructivist Teaching
✓ Pose problems that are or will be relevant to the
students.
✓ Structure learning around essential concepts.
Strategies
✓ The teacher has to work on the mind, on the feeling
of the child we have to provide opportunities to
success the child.
✓ Child rearing practices are very important.
Constructivist Teaching fosters critical thinking and creates active and motivated learners
Experiential Learning
What is it?
➢ Process of making meaning out of a direct
experience
➢ Learning by doing
Critical Factors
➢ Personalized reflection about an experience
➢ formulation of plans to apply learning to other
contexts
Carl Rogers
"Experiential learning is equivalent to personal
change and growth" feels that all human beings
have a natural propensity to learn; the role of the
teacher is to facilitate such learning.
The teacher's task is to train the pupil to perceive the
object accurately to the mind. we cannot neglect the
Imaging and intuitive side of the child this is important
for promoting cream children.
Implications of Education
A constructivist teaching Sequence:
1. Elicitation of ideas
2. Orientation
3. Restructuring of ideas
4. Clarification and exchange
5. Exposure to conflict situations
6. Construction of new ideas
Evaluation
7. Application of ideas
8. Review change in ideas
 Research Suggest that constructivist teaching is
an effective way to teach. It encourages active
and meaningful learning and Promotes
responsibility and autonomy.
 Because constructivist teaching is beneficial in
achieving desirable educational goals for
students. It is important for teachers to grow
professionally towards a constructivist Practice
 The teacher acts on the mind and conscience of
the students in such a manner that they are able
to unfold their hidden potentials including regard
Brighter side of constructivism
➢ Constructivism concentrates learning how to think
and understand
➢ Constructivist teacher develop skills and abilities to
empower students and to make them fool competent
and significant Constructivist teaching also requires
intelligence, creativity, patience responsiveness and
the ability to live Some of the tenets of constructivist
in pedagogical team are:
▪ Students come to the class with an
established world view for students to
change their world view requires work
▪ Students learn from each other as well as
from the teacher
▪ Students learn better by doing allowing and
creating opportunities for all to promotes
new ideas.
Fieldtrips
• structured activity that occurs outside the
classroom.
• can be a brief observational activity or a longer
more sustained investigation or project.
Its purpose
▪ offer an opportunity for students to get
exposure to "real" people and events
opportunity to make connections with
others.
▪ visit people and places that they are not
normally exposed to during the school day.
Narratives
• Narrative essays are told from a defined point of
view, often the author's, so there is feeling
• Specific and often sensory details provided to
get the reader involved in the elements and
sequence of the story.
Its purpose
▪ relies on personal experiences
▪ often in the form of a story
▪ Includes all convention of story telling:
plot, character, setting, climax, and
ending
▪ usually filled with details that are
carefully selected to explain. support, or
enhance the story
▪ All of the details relate to the main point
the writer is attempting to make.
Experiments
• methodical trial and error procedure carried out
with the goal of verifying, falsifying, or
establishing the validity of a hypothesis.
• Experiments provide insight into cause-and-
effect by demonstrating what outcome occurs
when a particular factor is manipulated
Simulations
• The teacher controls the parameters of this
"world" and uses it to achieve the desired
instructional results.
Its purpose
▪ promote concept attainment through
experiential practice
▪ effective at helping students understand
the nuances of a concept or circumstance
Situated Learning
Situated Learning: not an -ism but a way of
learning things
Language
a cultural practices
Teaching
a process of showing how things work in real-
life situations
Focus
practicing augmented real-life situations from
one topic to anotherl
Center of learning
arguments of learners
Patrons of Situated Learning
Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger
Situated Learning
▪ Students are often more deeply involved
in simulations than other activities
Games/play
• It provides the opportunity for children to work
out their feelings.
• Play builds social skills=
Storytelling
• conveying of events in words, images and
sounds, often by improvisation or
embellishment
• One reason for storytelling is to capture a
moment or event and immortalize it
• Storytelling should have the ability to transport
the listener to another time or place
Focused imaging
• Imaging enables students to:
o relax and allow their imaginations to take
them on journeys
o "experience" situations first hand
o respond with their senses to the mental
images formed.
• Imaging provides a focus and an opportunity for
open- minded exploration of new concepts in all
areas of study
• Imaging exercises nurture and develop students'
creative potentials
Role-playing
• In role playing, students act out characters in a
predefined "situation".
• allows students to take risk-free positions by
acting out characters in hypothetical situations.
• can help them understand the range of concerns,
values, and positions held by other people.
Model building
• involves the creation of models either from kits
or from materials and components acquired by
the builder.
Surveys
• The purpose of a survey depends what the
survey is used for.
• It is a method of gathering information from a
selection of individuals.
➢ learning is grounded in the actions of everyday
situations
➢ Knowledge is acquired situationally and
transfers only to similar situations.
➢ Learning is the result of the social process.
➢ Learning is not separated from the world of
action but exists in robust, complex, social
environments made up of actors, actions, and
situations.
The Implementation of Situated Learning
Select situations
engage the learners in complex, realistic,
problem-centered activities
Provide a scaffolds
on type & intensity necessary guidance
Be a facilitator
less support will be needed
Assess the learner's intellectual growth by
discussion
The Integration of Situated Learning and
Technology
Pro
▪ bring the real experience in the class room.
▪ allow student to make conclusion for
themselves.
Situated learning approach focused on student skill to help them deal with real problem.
Cooperative Learning
Learning
✓ Determine the elements of cooperative learning.
✓ Establish ways on what it takes for students to
work successfully in cooperative groups
✓ Identify and discuss ways to implement
Cooperative Learning strategies into the
classroom.
In a classroom, there is a place
Individual Learning
▪ Each student works alone
▪ Each strives for own success
▪ What benefits self does not affect others
▪ Each celebrates their own success
Competitive Learning
▪ Each students work alone
▪ Students want to outshine each other
▪ Students work against each other to achieve
a goal only one or few can attain
▪ What benefits self deprives others
Cooperative Learning
▪ Students work in small often heterogenous
groups
▪ Students share the same learning goals and
work together to achieve them
▪ What benefits one, benefits all
▪ Joint success is
Definition of Cooperative Learning
(Johnson, Johnson, & Holubec 1998)
“Cooperative Learning is the instructional
use of small groups so that students work together
to maximize their own and each other’s learning."
Importance of Cooperative
Students at school…
1. Care about each other
2. Respect each others’ differences
3. Try to protect each other
4. Trust each other
5. Cooperate with one another when working
on schoolwork together
6. Are often friends with students from
different races, religions, and cultures
7. Are easy to get to know
Basic elements of cooperative
✓ Positive Interdependence
➢ Each group member depends on each
other to accomplish a shared goal or task.
➢ Without the help of a member the group
will not be able to reach the desired goal.
▪ get away from memorizing facts.
▪ designs out plagiarism
▪ ncresed student engagement
Cons
▪ take more time in debate
▪ take more time to grader
▪ the topic can be too wider
▪ the role of teacher change into
▪ teacher is not a master, but become a facilitator
✓ Individual and Group Accountability
➢ Each group is accountable for achieving
its goals and each member is accountable
for his/her share of work.
✓ Interpersonal and Small Group Skills
➢ Students engage simultaneously in task
work and teamwork.
➢ Leadership, decision-making, trust-
building, communication, and conflict
management skills empower students to
manage both task work and teamwork
successfully.
✓ Group Processing
➢ Students reflect on how well the team is
functioning and how to function even
better.
✓ Face-to-Face Promotive Interaction
➢ Students promotes each other success by
sharing resources and helping,
supporting, encouraging, and applauding
each others’ effort.
Types of Groups
Cooperative base group
Cooperative base groups are long-term,
heterogenous cooperative learning groups (lasting
for at least one semester or year) with a stable
membership, whose primary responsibility is to give
each member the support, encouragement, and
assistance he/she needs to progress academically
and develop cognitively and socially in healthy
ways.
Formal cooperative learning groups
A formal cooperative learning group is when
students work together for one or several class
sessions to achieve shared learning goals and jointly
complete specific tasks and assignments.
Informal cooperative learning groups
An informal cooperative learning group is
one in which students work together temporarily.
This cooperative learning groups used to focus
student attention on the material to be learned,
create an expectation set and mood conducive to
learning, ensure students cognitively process the
material being taught, and provide closure to an
instructional session.
Responsibilities of Learners in Cooperative
Learning
Individual Responsibility
The learner should make sure he/she learn
something interesting and useful as part of his/her
individual growth and development
Discovery Approach
➢ Discovery is a teaching strategy which aims to
assist the student in finding solutions or answers
to a problem or attaining a learning objective
through self- discovery.
➢ He follows a step-by-step procedure and in the
end arrives at own meanings, interpretations and
conclusions.
Instructional Characteristics
1. The student gains first-hand experience.
2. The use of all the senses makes observations keen
and reliable.
3. Since the student discovers what they planned to
look for, learning becomes permanent.
4. It develops critical thinking. The skill in
employing the steps of the scientific method is
developed.
Limitations
1. Lack of needed tools may hamper the scientific
procedure.
2. Less capable ones may not be successful despite
guidance,
3. It may lead to trial-and-error unless properly
guided.
Suggestions
1. Make sure that all the materials and tools that will
be needed are available.
Inquiry Teaching
➢ Unlike other teaching models which emphasize
direct instruction, inquiry teaching aims to help
students seek answers to their own questions,
gather pieces of evidences and draw own
conclusions and generalizations.
➢ It puts premium on self-directed learning
activities patterned after the scientific
procedures and processes.
➢ As such, they learn by inquiring about
something, weighing and sorting out
information and building their own meaning.
➢ In so doing, they employ such processes as
analyzing, evaluating and synthesizing with an
end in view at discovering concepts by
themselves.
➢ Ultimately, they become independent,
autonomous learners capable of learning on
their own.
Instructional Characteristics
Following are some instructional characteristics that
are observed in inquiry teaching:
1. The scientific processes such as observing,
comparing, measuring, predicting, inferring,
communicating and drawing generalizations are
habitually employed during their investigations.
Group Responsibility
The learners should make sure that their
whole group learned something interesting and
useful as part of their group success and
accomplishments.
➢ The teacher may assist a student minimally in
initiating the search for information.
➢ Such technique is termed guided-discovery
➢ Along the way she may ask questions as
reminders to ascertain the right sequence and
direction of all the learning activities.
5. The joy and pride in discovering is worth all the
time and effort spent.
6. Such independent search can lead to full blown
research later.
7. The teacher stays nondirective, thus developing
independence and personal excitement as well.
2. Caution must be taken in classifying the data into
relevant and irrelevant needed. ones, otherwise the
conclusion will not be reliable.
3. It is in the analysis of the recorded data where
guidance is most 4. This method is recommended
for those who exhibit scientific attitudes and
systematic work habits.
5. Employ this method for those who possess the
necessary skills and are observed to be persistent in
completing what they have started.
2. The answers sought are not known in advance to
the students. Confronted with questions and
problems, they suggest ways of finding answers or
solutions. This leads to the real meaning of
"discovery", thus making learning more lasting and
meaningful.
3. The students are genuinely interested and highly
motivated to work either independently or in small
groups. Full and active involvement is spontaneous.
4. During the investigations, such questions as how,
why, prove, justify and others persist which drive
them to continue pursuing a conclusion or a
solution.
5 Suspense and excitement could be felt in a highly
charged classroom atmosphere.
Role of the Teacher
The development and continuing enhancement of
skills in the scientific processes become the core of
the teacher's repertoire of learning activities.
1. As a start, she should help students learn
how to ask questions.
2. In addition to inculcating an inquiring mind,
the teacher allows to a great extent
flexibility in the students' ways of doing
things.
 3. Inquiry teaching extracts tremendous
demands on the teacher's ability to plan
learning activities that will improve critical
thinking, objectivity and rationality among
students.
4. Above all, the teacher herself should be fully
aware of her changed role that of a guide,
facilitator and counselor rather than the
usual authority who not only determines the
material to be learned but also dictates how
it should be learned.
Teacher's Task in Inquiry-Based Teaching-
Learning When using inquiry-based lessons,
teachers are responsible for.
1. starting the inquiry process;
2. promoting student dialog
3. transitioning between small groups and classroom
discussions;
4. intervening to clear misconceptions or develop
students' understanding of content material; and
5. modeling scientific procedures and attitudes
Inquiry-Based Learning Activities
Some specific learning processes that people engage
in during inquiry-learning include:
✓ Creating questions of their own
✓ Obtaining supporting evidence to answer the
question(s)
✓ Explaining the evidence collected
✓ Connecting the explanation to the
knowledge obtained from the investigative
process
Inquiry-based learning covers a range of
activities to learning and teaching, including:
❖ Field-work
❖ Case studies
❖ Investigations
❖ Individual and group projects
❖ Research project

Reflective Teaching
➢ Reflective teaching puts premium on the ability
of the teacher to guide students to "reflect" on
their owp experiences in order to arrive at new
understandings and I meanings.
➢ According t Dewey, reflective teaching is
"behavior which involves active, persistent and
careful consideration of any belief or practice."
➢ Everyone learns from an experience, either
positive or negative learning.
➢ Through reflection, the student's experience
acquires meaning It serves as the basis for new
ideas and behavior.
➢ The capacity to reflect differs in different
individuals, hence the ability to learn from an
experience likewise differs.
Strategies
1. Journalizing strategy. Journal writing is the best
way to help one reflect on her own teaching.
2. A portfolio is a personal document that includes
frank, honest and spontaneous account of
experiences. It is useful for jotting down quickly
and capturing significant insights before they are
forgotten. It can also be used to analyze changes in
one's growth and development.
3. Self-analysis. A reflective teacher is able to keep
a record of incidents, problems and issues that truly
concern herself as a professional
4. On-the-spot observation of student's responses.
Some questions that must be answered instantly are
as follows:
Facilitating Reflection
Analysis is the "processing phase" which occurs
after an experience. The learner recaptures her
experience, thinks about it and evaluates it.
Therefore, the important role of the teacher is that
of a facilitator and a guide in developing the skill in
analyzing a past learning experience.