LTMS 525

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.

constructivism is a theory of knowledge acquisition, not a theory of pedagogy;