Expert interview

Interview with Jacqueline Grennon Brooks In the following video clips, Jacqueline Grennon Brooks, an educational theorist, constructivism advocate, and this workshop's content expert, answers questions about constructivism. Concept to Classroom: You have said that constructivism is a "life view." Would you explain that?

Jacqueline Grennon Brooks: A lot of people try to look at constructivism as a program, or a methodology, or as a series of techniques. But it's really a life view. It's really a philosophy, it's an epistemology, it's a way of looking at teaching and learning, it's a way of looking at how people construct understandings of our world.
Concept to Classroom: What do you mean by "construct understandings"?

Jacqueline Grennon Brooks: A lot of people try to look at constructivism as a program, or a methodology, or as a series of techniques. But it's really a life view. It's really a philosophy, it's an epistemology, it's a way of looking at teaching and learning, it's a way of looking at how people construct understandings of our world.

Concept to Classroom: So, where and how can a teacher begin?

Jacqueline Grennon Brooks: Constructivism is the study of how people learn. And everyday in our classrooms when children arrive, and we can be looking carefully at what they are teaching us about their learning processes, we have begun our study of constructivism. The opportunity to begin that study exists everyday for every teacher.

Concept to Classroom: People often have difficulty grasping the concept of constructivism. Why is that? Is it because it is so abstract? Is it because it has been misrepresented? Can you give us a simple explanation?
Jacqueline Grennon Brooks: It's hard to grasp, the concept of constructivism, because it's a very complex study, it's the study of human thinking. Just as a physicist cannot just open up the atom to look inside, or just as the earth and space scientist can not delve into and open up history to look inside, the physicist has to use proxies, the earth and space scientist has to use proxies for the information and the knowledge that they're trying get and put together. The same thing for the teacher. We're trying to understand children's thinking but our only access to that thinking is the child's statements and questions, the child's behavior, the products that the child is creating. And we have a tough job, it's not easy being a good teacher.

Concept to Classroom: Do you think the interest in constructivism is primarily American-based?

Jacqueline Grennon Brooks: Not at all. In the Reggio Emilio project in Italy, those educators have been models for all of us on how to foster children's thinking in the early childhood years. In the Netherlands, the mathematics education has been a model for many American-based programs. In England, we have technology education, science education, being a driving force for all of us. It's a worldwide endeavor , this notion of trying to better understand the teachinglearning dynamic from the point of view that it is us as individuals whose responsibility it is, to make sense of our world.

Concept to Classroom: How does constructivist teaching differ from the traditional approach?
Jacqueline Grennon Brooks: In a traditional setting, the teacher takes charge of a lot of the intellectual work in that classroom. The teacher plans the scope and sequence, pre-synthesizes and prepackages a lot of the learning. In the constuctivist classroom, the student is in charge of that packaging. The student gets amorphous information, the student gets ill-defined problems,

and it's the student who has to put together his or her own personal question and figure out how to go about answering it with the teacher being the mediator of that meaning-making process.

Concept to Classroom: Have you found the recent information and computer explosion and the mandate to connect each classroom to the Internet promising for constructivist learning situations?
Jacqueline Grennon Brooks: Changing from a traditional classroom to one more rooted in the students' conceptualizations has never been a problem of access to information. So I don't think we need to look at the computer explosion in terms of its access to information as the link to a better educational experience. But we can look at the computer explosion as a mechanism by which students can express themselves, by which students can create new knowledge, and use computer tools as a, as a way of expressing their new creations.

Concept to Classroom: What other things ought to happen to bring the promise of technology to constructivism?
Jacqueline Grennon Brooks: I think we need to ask a different question. I think the question is, how can students use technology to answer the questions that they are posing for themselves . Once the student has the question, the constructivist teacher will endorse any type of technology that will help that child answer his or her question.

Concept to Classroom: What are the implications of constructivism for the school administrator?
Jacqueline Grennon Brooks: An administrator adopting or experimenting with a constructivist viewpoint has to change his or her understanding of what's going on in the classroom in terms of student learning. We're not looking at teacher performance. We're looking at the teacher as an individual helping students make meaning. So the administrator and teacher, together, can conference about meaning-making of their students.

Concept to Classroom: What are the implications of constructivism for the child's parents, guardians, and community?
Jacqueline Grennon Brooks: For the community and for parents, their only real access to understanding schools is typically by the test grades that their children bring home. When we change from a traditional to a constructivist-based educational setting, we really need to do a lot of work in helping the community understand different indicators of excellence. We have to help the community look at the products that the students are generating in terms of the thinking behind those products and what those products are expressing in terms of meaning.

Concept to Classroom: Test scores are often the basis by which community members judge schools and schools receive state funding. What do you think of test scores as a way to evaluate performance? Jacqueline Grennon Brooks: Oftentimes, we look at test scores because it's the only information that we have. I think we as a profession, need to do much better at broadening how we communicate the outcomes of the learning processes going on in our schools. The focus on test scores has done more to narrow curriculum, and limit students' opportunities for growth and development than have those test scores been an indicator of success. Concept to Classroom: Would you like to add anything?
Jacqueline Grennon Brooks: I have had teachers with whom I worked tell me that once they have adopted, studied and adopted this new viewpoint , that they can't go back again. They can not go back to their original teaching, that once they have experienced the energy of their

classroom and their students, forging together new understanding, and once they talk about how much they have learned about the concepts themselves, through collaborating with their students, that the traditional method simply doesn't hold the value it used to.

http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/constructivism/index_sub3.html