7. Teachers serve primarily as
guides and facilitators of learning, not instructors. The role of the
teacher in the learning process has often been a major factor in the apparent
division between cognitive constructivism and social/radical constructivism.
Teachers, in the cognitive constructivist perspective, are usually portrayed as
instructors who "transmit knowledge." The teacher instructs, while
the learner learns. In actuality, in the cognitive constructivist perspective,
the role of the teacher is to create experiences in which the students will
participate that will lead to appropriate processing and knowledge
acquisition. Consequently, cognitive constructivism supports the teacher as a
guide or facilitator to the extent that the teacher is guiding or facilitating
relevant processing. Contrarily, since social and radical constructivism
eschew any direct knowledge of reality, there is no factual knowledge to
transmit and the only role for the teacher is to guide students to an
awareness of their experiences and socially agreed-upon meanings. This teacher
as guide metaphor indicates that the teacher is to motivate, provide examples,
discuss, facilitate, support, and challenge, but not to attempt to act as a
knowledge conduit.
"The outcome, as it's usually represented, is that the children who were able to wait for an extra treat scored better on measures of cognitive and social skills many years later and had higher SAT scores. Thus, if we teach kids to put off the payoff as long as possible, they'll be more successful. But that simplistic conclusion misrepresents, in several ways, what the research actually found. "
