Constructivism & Constructionism

“People learn by actively constructing new knowledge, rather than by having information "poured" into their heads” (Thurmond, A. 1999). This statement really made me think about my instructional strategies and how constructionism could be effective in my classroom. Constructionism is a great model for learning; it involves learning through creating a meaningful product. In my video and film classes that product is usually a video, but I would like for my students to create other types of media like posters and PowerPoint presentations. The problem with this type of learning is the extra time that is required.

Video and film classes are not offered at every school, and schools rarely have more than one video teacher. Compared to a subject like U.S. History, there are very few teachers and as a result, very few resources. Unlike most of the teachers in my school I have to create my own presentations from scratch. My textbooks either have no PowerPoints included or very poor quality PowerPoints with no sense of flow and very few graphics. Over the last four years I have become very efficient in creating PowerPoints from my textbooks (I use 5 different textbooks for my various courses). I can sit down in one night and make a decent PowerPoint presentation based on a chapter in the book in a couple of hours. I always include photos and videos that demonstrate the ideas from the chapter. Each week I will usually present one chapter in my Video I class, and one chapter in my Advanced Video class. It does sometimes seem like I am trying to "pour knowledge" into their heads, but the rest of the time is dedicated to working on projects and completing vocabulary assignments that reinforce the key concepts from the chapter.

The alternative is to allow students to construct the PowerPoints themselves and present them to the class. I have used this method in the past for my Sports Marketing class, but there are a number of different problems that arise.

The first problem is time. My classes are only 54 minutes long, and it always seems like students are either making great strides and are interrupted by the bell or they use the bell as an excuse to stop working because they will not be able to get anything done in just 5 minutes. Another problem is that some students do not have as much experience with computers and tend to work slowly, so either they do not have time to complete their PowerPoint assignment on time or they end up with a poorly made PowerPoint that makes me wish I had just taught the lesson myself.

The second problem I have is that students do not understand the big picture; they have a very myopic view of their project. They do not make connections to other lessons, they do not make connections between the sections they divide among group members, they skip over things of importance or go over important concepts too quickly. They often do not understand the main purpose of the chapter and go a mile wide and an inch deep into the material instead of explaining some important ideas in depth and the relationships of the ideas.

The third problem I have is poor presentation skills. Many students are terrified of public speaking, and while I try to give them the best environment possible for presenting they are still teenagers and are very pre-occupied with what their peers think of them. I have students that do not project their voice, students that go over everything too quickly, students that are tough to understand, and students that do not talk about everything, telling the class just to "read it themselves." Often these students do not care about the grade they get on their presentation, they would gladly trade a poor grade for less time talking in front of everyone.

So, while constructionism and project-based learning is a great theory, sometimes it is a little tougher to put into practice. I love resources like Edutopia, the PBL Co-Laboratory, and PBL Checklist, but more as general resources than course-specific materials. The bright side is that there is definitely an opportunity to create resources for video and film teachers like myself, and one day I might write my own book on teaching video and film in the high school environment from my experiences.