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.
