Musings 71: My Attempt with Learning by Doing

How do you convince someone that an individual learns better by “doing” than by “listening”?

Can you do it by making her “listen” to your long lecture on the superior nature of “doing” w.r.t learning?

Isn’t that like you becoming angry on someone for believing that anger transforms a person?

So, that’s exactly what I did a few months back when trying to convince my friend, a young enthusiastic teacher, that the lecture method, inspite of its benefits, is a very limited and inefficient way of teaching and learning. Of course, she wasn’t convinced.

The Debate

She argued that children need to be ‘taught first,’ before introducing to a task- which meant that children have to be explicitly told what they are ‘supposed to discover,’ before getting into the task!

I realised that her understanding of teaching and learning came from what is known as a behaviourist model, where you assume that the learner doesn’t know anything about what is being taught. In other words, the assumption is that the learner is a ‘blank slate’ on which the teacher writes ‘Knowledge’ that she posses. Note that, here, teacher believes that there is something fixed called “Knowledge” which the learner doesn’t know, which the teacher imparts. In this approach, the teacher may be willing to do activities in her class, but would want to control the outcomes because her whole focus is on getting “the right result”- Knowledge! If a learner discovers something else in the process, which the teacher did not intend, that will be completely over looked.

That is, the whole idea is that “there is ‘Knowledge,’ which I let you ‘pick up’ from this basket (task) that I have placed before you.”

There is no agency for the learner. This is what we call a typical ‘teacher centric education.’

Constructivism, as opposed to behaviourism, believes in ‘constructing’ knowledge. It doesn’t believe in ‘the Knowledge’ handed down as the gospel of truth from generation to generation. It argues that “individuals actively create knowledge” in the context of their own experiences. Here a teacher would give learners a task to explore various possibilities. There is no concept of “the knowledge” which all individuals “have to” discover invariably, in the absence of which she would “fail”. Therefore, a single task may give ten different insights to ten different learners – all of which can be valid, important and goes into the corpus of ‘knowledge- under construction.’

(This, I find, is most important in social sciences education, where there is no “Truth” but only knowledge which is continuosly built, demolished and re-built)

The developed world has embraced constructivism long back. But many of our teachers are still committed to the old world view of teaching and learning. Infact they are so faithful to it that when exposed to constructivist methods and strategies, they modify and apply it in the behaviourist model!

Back to Our Issue

I was a little disturbed that I couldn’t make my young teacher-friend see (appreciate) my point. Partly because it told me something about my own skills as a teacher and a communicator. However, I left it unfinished, for another day.

Months later, today, I was asked by a senior colleague to present before a group of educators, various constructivist paradigms of teaching and learning. As I was preparing for it, it suddenly occurred to me why I failed with my friend!

Rather than letting my friend ‘discover’ constructivism as a superior teaching-learning process through her personal exploration, I was eager to impart ‘the Knowledge’ that it was great. In other words, I was trying to “teach” her constructivism through the behaviourist model.

What an irony!

—
Srinath Mohandas
May 04, 2017