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... constructivist teachers structure lessons around big ideas, not small bits of information. Exposing students to wholes first helps them determine the relevant parts as they refine their understandings of the wholes.Right.
source:
The Courage to Be Constructivist
Martin Brooks
Always good for the student to "determine the relevant parts."
Determining the relevant parts being one of the most difficult tasks in teaching and writing, let's hand that off to the student.
I think I've mentioned that I spent many years at sea after Jimmy's autism diagnosis. The disorder itself is bewildering, and the world that surrounds it is pretty well captured by Susan F. Rzucidlo in her short piece, Welcome to Beirut, a parody of Emily Pearl Kingsley's classic Welcome to Holland.
Susan R. beat me to the punch, btw. Almost from the time Jimmy was diagnosed, Ed and I had joked about writing a short piece we were going to call "Welcome to Beirut," and then someone else went and did it.
So.... read a few paragraphs of "Welcome to Beirut" and tell me how a person goes about determining the relevant parts in the middle of a shooting war.
I was a model learner.
I was reading everything I could get my hands on, I was attending conferences, I was taking Jimmy to doctors and therapists and special educators, I was constructing knowledge right and left, or trying to ...... and I remained deeply confused.
Then Shirley Cohen published her book. She had planned to call it "A Map of Autism," and that's what it was. Or, rather, it was a map of the world of autism: the advocates, the educators, the theorists, and the desperately mourning parents. What were they all talking about? Until Shirley wrote her book, I didn't know.
She picked up all the autism pieces -- the many moving parts -- that littered every surface of my house and life, polished them until they shone, and stacked and arranged each one in its proper places on tidy shelves she'd built after a lifetime studying the education of children with special needs.
At the end of her very short book, I saw. I don't know whether I can still find a copy of the review I wrote for Targeting Autism, but I do remember the last line: Shirley Cohen's book is a gift.
So.... I have to assume that Martin Brooks has never had to confront a "whole" in the shape of his own severely handicapped child. Shirley's book appeared in 1998; Jimmy was then 11 years old. He had been diagnosed at 4, and I had spent 7 years of my life trying without success to determine the relevant parts.
I often have the feeling that constructivism is not a very nice thing to do to children.
Maybe those 7 years after Jimmy's diagnosis have something to do with it.
wholes, not parts: Martin Brooks and The Constructivist Classroom
whole math
top-down teaching
15 comments:
Thanks for both those links [shirley cohen and Susan rzucidio] food for thought.
Best wishes
Hi!
I see you've got a crew similar to mine!
I'm kidding about Beirut!
This is a wonderfully revealing post. Although I do not have an autistic child, I think I can relate from my own experiences about how unhelpful it is to have those in power withhold knowledge because of some stupid theories about what is best for me. The overriding issue of wasted time cannot be minimized. The educationists are doing this to our children.
From Welcome to Beirut:
“Good times are had, and because we know how bad the bad times are, the good times are even better.”
Exposing students to wholes first helps them determine the relevant parts as they refine their understandings of the wholes.
I would love to see the research that supports that.
Adults and older kids, yes, maybe. Young children have no problem with parts to whole learning. I imagine a good number would be completely overwhelmed by the "big ideas."
Everytime I read things about constructivism there always appears to be a determination to treat the child's brain as though it were an adult's. They're just little adults.
was an adult's?
I miss Wiki. Preview isn't enough for me.
"Everytime I read things about constructivism there always appears to be a determination to treat the child's brain as though it were an adult's."
Another constructivist conceit is that pupils are scholars in the various fields. Their purpose is to to learn "inert" stuff but to create new knowledge.
BTW, I liked your use of the vanishing subjunctive (...it were).
Oh, right. I think it was the subjunctive, so "were" would be alright.
I should have trusted my gut instinct. But that can lead me astray, also.
Susans,
and then they will assume that an adult's brain is like a child's.
If manipulatives and heuristic understanding work for second graders then 10th graders should use those methods as well.
Well, the thing is..... what is a "whole" when you're talking about knowledge?
I would say that a "whole" is simply an undifferentiated & unorganized mass of parts.
I have this experience all the time in nonfiction writing.
In one sense, yes, "autism" is a whole -- meaning all of it is AUTISM, one word, one thing.
But the novice who has no teacher isn't really experiencing a whole; he's experiencing a constant, unceasing succession of parts that add up to nothing.
I'd be willing to bet that for the novice there is no such thing as a whole.
For the novice there are trees, but no forest - AND all the trees look alike; there's no way for the novice to tell them apart.
Shirley's book really was a gift. I can't say it any better than that - and I'm not up to expressing the pain of living in a deeply confused state about your child for years.
What made it especially painful was that my confusion was primarily over the dozens of treatment approaches. With autism there are always miracle cures; every 4 years (I think it's 4) some child miraculously emerges and the entire autism world explodes in a frenzy of hope and house-mortgaging.
It took me quite a while even to figure out whether these cures were real (I believe they are) - and, after that, to figure out what these cures, or emergences, might mean for the rest of us.
Meanwhile, in the realm of treatment and education there are also competing models.... and I simply had no way to categorize or grasp or sort through it all.
What was I supposed to be doing?
What was Jimmy's school doing?
btw, when I say "cures" I use the term lightly.
I don't have an opinion on whether people like Georgie Stehli were cured -- and if so whether they were cured by the treatment their parents assumed caused the cure.
In the case of Georgie, I would say that she went from being pretty low-functioning to being a very high-functioning adult. In fact, Georgie was one of the people who first made me realize there was such a thing as high functioning autism, or autistic people who could "pass."
I have no idea whether auditory training was the thing that helped Georgie, but I wouldn't be surprised it it was.
Finally, after informally interviewing lots of parents, physicians, and special educators across the country I believe there is a category of kids who look autistic at age 2 (around there) and who for some unknown reason no longer look autistic at around 4 or 5.
These kids absolutely exist; I'm sure of it.
For the time being, I believe their story is genetic; they have some kind of countervailing genetic factor that overrides the autism genes being expressed when they are 2.
This is purely speculative, obviously.
But I'm not speculating about the existence of the kids.
A lot of these kids, btw, are siblings of kids with autism. That's how I found out about them.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are tons of them in families without autism; the reason the families with autism know about them is that they knew what autism is and they saw all the symptoms in the second child. Their eyes were "open."
When the child "grew out of it" that made a very large impression.
catherine, my younger brother was not diagnosed as having Prader-Willi syndrome until he was almost twelve years old. His best advocate has always been his family, especially my parents.
oh my gosh!!!
Have you read that incredible book about adoption ..... LIMITS OF HOPE???
You MUST get it.
It's incredible.
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