Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Our community has somehow confused constructivism with “teacherless”
(Dillenbourg, 2008). Let us state clearly that promoting the role of teachers as
orchestrators does not imply that they have to lecture intensively or that they have
to make a show. Orchestration would be compatible with “teacher-centric construc-
tivism”: it is the students who have to learn through their activity but teachers have
the leadership of the whole scenario: lectures may be integrated into constructivist
perspective for several purposes as in the 3 examples below.
•
Debriefing
lectures “work very well”: these are not simple feedback sessions but
lectures that address
new
course contents through the data produced by the stu-
dents themselves (experiment results, projects, assignments,
). The drawback
is that these lectures have to be prepared after receiving the students' contribution
which require last minute preparation or even some improvization.
...
•
There is a “time for telling” (Schwartz & Bransford, 1998): lectures “work well”
in terms of learning when students have previously acquired some experience of
what the lecturer is going to say; when they have the meanings but not the words.
•
Lectures enable teachers to “qualify” the knowledge for instance to explain to stu-
dents why an equation is beautiful, why a theory is somehow obsolete, why these
results are surprising,
This “personal touch” or meta-knowledge can hardly be
made explicit without over-simplification. It's the beauty of human presence to
be able to convey these subtle cues.
...
Providing teachers with a strong leadership implies that they have the power to
drive the system and not to be prisoners of an instructional plan. Acknowledging
the role of teachers does not simply mean to let them tune some options or param-
eters but to empower them with respect to technology. This implies that teachers
are allowed to bypass decisions taken by the system and to flexibly rearrange their
own scenario. However, we will see that flexibility has some limits described in
“Implications for learning technologies.”
Factor 2.
Flexibility
. Teachers have the possibility to change the learning
scenario on the fly, as far as it makes sense.
As leaders of a class, teachers have the responsibility of what students do in
this class. They don't have the same degree of control that the orchestra conductors
have over their musicians, but they still have to be “in control” of their class. A
method “does not work” if students become distracted, if they talk to each other
when the teacher speaks to them, if they read their email while they should interact
with a simulation. Some methods may reduce the authority of teachers because some
students start to do silly things while waiting for late groups, because teachers lose
face when encountering technical bugs.
Factor 3.
Control
. Teachers maintain in the classroom the level of interest and
concentration necessary for the on-going activities.
