This might not apply the constructivism proper. But one thing that bothered me a bit about more progressive methods when I worked as a teacher was how they often became tools of manipulation. By creating the illusion of control and freedom I could get the students to reveal more of themselves, and that gave me more knowledge do use to figure out how to make them submit to the mandated curriculum. This might just be a problem if you are ethically oversensitive. But I prefer facilitating learning in environments where I do not have the power or any reason to force a certain outcome on the learner. And in those situations constructivism can be quite useful, as can drills.
In encouraging people to make models that fit their particular psychology me make them use models that are rare or seldom threaded. This might give them illusory sense of uniqueness, they might not benefit or expect to benefit from the knowledge of others.
Coming up with their own models they might have unique problems that if we encourage to take their own constructions seriously they will have problems that we don't have answers to. A geology teacher teaching that earth is round in some capacity needs to be able to deal with flat-earther talking-pint and fumble points. taking a positivde spin on this is "they make their own reserach questions" but making a bad spin is "we spend more time of doing it wrong in X ways rather than the known working ways"
I've been thinking about this for a while. I spent the last 10 years teaching music lessons to children and a few adults. I haven't studied education formally, but have read some of the literature that I thought would be helpful.
My feeling at this point is that constructivism is a useful thing to do, but that it takes a lot of investment on the part of the teacher to pull off at all. It also is slower than the "imitative" approach to education. It is obvious to me that it would overall harm, not help, a person to win a Nobel prize in physics by requiring them to reconstruct all of physics on their own first. But mixing in experiences of figuring out chunks of knowledge for oneself is more satisfying and useful than pure imitation.
Teaching still relies a lot on the teacher's intuition and personal relationship with the student. It's not enough to implement constructivism. To use it effectively, you need to implement it well, and on the correct problem area. Insufficient constructivism is not the cause of all learning challenges or experiences of student boredom. Figuring out the right blend is just one of several major problems in the overall challenge of optimizing a student's education.
So to refine your original post, I recommend shifting more toward questions like:
When is constructivism the right approach for a particular student or subject, and why?
What proportion of constructivism vs. imitative approaches is ideal?
Can we know when constructivism is the key issue for a particular educational problem?
If one student is taught addition via constructivism, and the other by imitation, is there really a fundamental difference in their understanding of addition? Or is the difference in the amount of skill they gain in two different approaches to learning how to learn, rather than in the amount of skill they gain in the object-level topic?
How can we implement constructivist approaches for new topics where it's not normally applied?
Maybe the constructivist approach works better for subjects with long inferential distances, such as math. Any individual fact is easier to memorize than to understand, in short term. The problem is, with memorization you are building a tower that will collapse under its own weight. Also, a misremembered fact feels exactly the same as a correctly remembered one, so there is no self-check.
I think you can't use constructivism to learn what is the capital of France.
My first approximation for "when to use constructivist approach" would be like:
The motivation for the question is to help a (constructivist) teacher do their job well, or to help a teacher unfamiliar with constructivism learn to do their job better.
This assumes that educational paradigms matter a great deal. I would expect that skill around effectively projecting authority in front of children and classroom management are more important for the teacher to do their job well.
I'm sure constructivism works for some people some of the time but for a public mass education system it doesn't seem scalable. One of my goto bloggers on education has written a lot against this idea, this is one of his posts. https://gregashman.wordpress.com/2020/05/23/whatever-happened-to-constructivism/comment-page-1/
Not sure if I am reading it correctly, but the main argument seems to be that "pure discovery" is inefficient compared to e.g. "guided discovery"... which is something that every constructivist teacher in my bubble would definitely agree with, and they would probably call the "pure discovery" a strawman of constructivism (the first bullet point in my question). Now the question is how much my bubble is typical among educators.
Making a note that whenever I mention constructivism, I should emphasize that I am talking about the "guided discovery" version.
In writing fiction, advice often given to new writers is "show, don't tell."
I've long thought that this advice is overly simplistic, or possibly incomplete. In the end, everything a writer writes is telling something.
"Mark was sad." - Telling Mark's emotion
"A tear fell down Mark's cheek." Showing Mark's emotion, by telling what's going on.
Without giving the matter an abundance of thought, Constructivism seems similar to me. Everything a teacher teaches is some kind of password. And even when the teacher is trying to get the student to construct mental models for themselves, the teacher is telling something.
So the question isn't whether or not constructivism is superior to memorization, any more than showing is superior to telling in writing. Both are necessary; the question is at what level of abstraction each is best used.
My personal opinion is that routine skills - the kind of thing you have to do all the time, over and over again, like hammering a nail in carpentry or adding two number together in math - should be memorized, at least at first. Not because that's inherently superior in any sense, but because it enables other, more complicated tasks to proceed faster. Those more complicated tasks are then good candidates for constructivism.
Another way to say this is that gears are made of atoms. Since education has to start somewhere, might as well start by memorizing gears so they can be constructed into complex machinery.
Then, later, you can go back and explain that gears are not the fundamental unit of matter, or ten is not a fundamental base, or nails aren't the only way to secure two pieces of wood together.
Those more complicated tasks are then good candidates for constructivism.
Wait, wouldn't that mean explaining difficult stuff to kids who never previously had the experience of understanding the simple stuff? And who were until now actively trained to memorize instead of understanding?
Also, what is the right moment to change the strategy? Every task is simple or complicated relative to something else. So when one teacher says "okay, this task is complicated, we should slow down", another would say "nah, just memorize this too, the next chapter is the really...
I have in my mind this idea that direct instruction is the most effective pedagogical method yet invented, but we don't do it because most existing teachers hate teaching that way. I wonder how, if at all, constructivism could be made to work with it, since otherwise the effectiveness of DI would seem to be another argument against pure constructivism.
Unfortunately, the Wikipedia article doesn't help me understand how exactly this works. The list of methods -- "tutorials, participatory laboratory classes, discussion, recitation, seminars, workshops, observation, active learning, practica, or internships" -- seems to contain pretty much everything.
Trying to reverse-engineer from the sections on effectiveness and criticism:
That... kinda sounds to me like traditional teaching, only with smaller groups and students divided by skill level, which seems like an obvious improvement (just don't tell anyone who has "inclusion" as an applause light). The best results are for students with learning disabilities, where the obvious part is that of course it helps if they can proceed at their own speed, but the non-obvious part is that they seem to follow the same script (only slower) and it works great.
It also seems like a lot of secret sauce is in how exactly the scripts are prepared. It sounds plausible that having the best teachers prepare the script, and the others follow it, could be an improvement over each teacher trying their own methods. (The obvious next question is whether a teacher who merely follows a script couldn't be replaced with a computer.)
most existing teachers hate teaching that way
Well, it is like mental Taylorism, so I would probably hate such job, too. The only fun part in this system is designing the scripts. Perhaps schools using this system should hire much less qualified teachers. I mean, following the script should not require university education, should it? Also it feels like a "heads I win, tails you lose" proposition for the teacher: if students learn well, praise goes to the system, if students fail, blame goes to the teacher (the Wikipedia article says the teachers are evaluated based on measurable student learning).
None of this is meant as an argument against the system, if it delivers good results (some studies say yes; at least one says no). But the system would require hiring a different kind of person as a teacher (someone who doesn't mind just following the script), and a different kind of education for such teachers (why teach them all the things they will not be allowed to use anyway).
I wonder how, if at all, constructivism could be made to work with it
Based on the description in Wikipedia, it is not clear how much the specific scripts help create mental models. Perhaps they already do. A constructivist would probably disagree with giving a ready-made model, but it is also an improvement over memorizing passwords.
The theory behind it is described here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303721842_Theory_of_Instruction_Principles_and_Applications
Thank you! Sounds very interesting, but those 700+ pages will take a while to read.
EDIT:
After reading the first 90 pages, here are my notes:
Not bad, but I wish these guys would write more briefly.
Seems to me that constructivist education is already "in the water supply" of Less Wrong. My tweet-length definition of constructivism would be "teaching students so that they construct mental gears-level models of the subject, as opposed to just memorizing the teachers' passwords"; and I assume most people here would agree that this is the right thing to do.
My question is how much this is a fair characterization - or perhaps it is abstracting away some very important stuff - and what are the best arguments against constructivism. Because, per Litany of Tarski, if constructivism is wrong, I want to believe it is wrong; although frankly I do not expect it to be fundamentally wrong, more like constructivists having some typical blind spots, in which case I want to know where they are.
The motivation for the question is to help a (constructivist) teacher do their job well, or to help a teacher unfamiliar with constructivism learn to do their job better. Therefore if the objection is e.g. that Piaget was historically wrong about some technical detail, the importance of this objection depends on how likely today someone is to make a mistake in designing their lessons because of that fact.
Here are my attempts to steelman the opposition to constructivism: