Constance Kamii on Constructivism

Because I'm teaching math for the first time in my career, I have been doing a lot of research on how children learn math. You'll notice that this is not necessarily the same as researching how teachers teach math.

I am so thankful that I came across the work of Constance Kamii (thank you to Alfie Kohn for citing so much of her research in his books and for this tweet). 

Here is an excerpt that I find fascinating from this interview with Constance Kamii:

Question: In a constructivist classroom, the teacher bases instruction on the scientific research of Piaget. If a person spends time in a constructivist classroom and a traditional classroom, what differences would be observed? In the students? In the teacher? In the social atmosphere?

Constance Kamii: In a traditional room you would probably see neatly arranged desks, neatly obedient children, probably lots of worksheets. That keeps kids very neat and quiet and well behaved. In a constructivist classroom you will probably see lots of movement, if not noise, especially when they play games. (The students) will certainly be talking a lot and arguing back and forth. Their opinions will be asked, and the kids will challenge each other. There will be lots of spontaneity and what I like to see, but it’s hard to produce, children who are thinking. Thinking takes various shapes, and arguing is one way. You also see children who are deeply involved with trying things out with their hands or some other thing. You can tell when children have an empty head and an empty expression and when they are really thinking. That’s what I like to see, and that’s what I often see in a constructivist classroom.

Question: Schools of education have come under fire recently. What could be done to improve teacher education?

Constance Kamii: To improve teacher education, I think the best education is to have future teachers in the classroom to begin with and to have them generate questions about certain problems and what to do with certain problems and to start reading and teaching from those questions. I think that what is wrong, at least from what I have seen, is that generally (students of education) are now stuffed with words and theory and so teachers come out thinking that theory is irrelevant and useless. They are going through these theories without relationships to the classroom situations, and so all that means nothing whereas if they generated their own questions and were then sent to theories, education would be much better. On the contrary, future teachers are often told good, useful principles, and they go into public school classrooms and see flatly contradictory, bad practices. That is the reality of teacher education. Schools of education tend to be much more theoretically advanced than the usually awful classroom situations. (Future teachers) have to be very lucky to end up in a constructivist classroom for student teaching. Those things should be improved, but that is much harder to do in reality.

Question: What words of encouragement could you offer educators in our “test happy” environment?

Constance Kamii: There is just no end in capitulating. If your score gets higher, the principal is going to want higher and higher scores. All that for whom? Not the kids. My recommendation is: Do what’s best for the kids.