Reflection 3

Reflection 3
There are three types of Constructivist Lesson Plans. One Constructivist Lesson plan was created by George W. Gagnon, Jr. and Michelle Collay. The lesson plan was revised in the past seven years and the design contains six important elements. (Collay) The six elements are as follows: Situation, Groupings, Bridge, Questions, Exhibit, and Reflections. The situation asks: What situation are you going to arrange for students to explain? The situation should have a title and describe a process of solving problems, answering questions, creating metaphors, making decisions, drawing conclusions, or setting goals. It should also include what you expect the students to do and how students will make their meaning. (Collay) The groupings has two categories: first is how are you going to make groupings of students. It may me as a whole class, individuals, in teams. It also includes what process you use to group them. Second is how you are going to arrange groupings of materials that students will use to explain the situation. It may be by physical modeling, graphically representing, numerically describing, or individually writing about their collective experience. (Collay) The Bridge is an initial activity intended to determine students’ prior knowledge and to build a “bridge” between what they already know and what they might learn by the explaining the situation. It may be a simple problem to solve, having a class discussion, playing a game, or making lists. (Collay) The Questions could take place during each element of the Learning Design. You will need to use questions to introduce the situation, arrange the groupings, set up the bridge, keep active learning going, prompt exhibits, and encourage reflections. (Collay) The Exhibit involves having the students make an exhibit for others of whatever record they made to record their thinking as they were explaining the situation. It could be writing a description on cards, making a graph, chart, acting out their impressions, constructing a physical representation with models, or others. (Collay) Finally, the Reflections are the student’s reflections about what they thought while explaining the situation and then saw the exhibit from others. The students’ would include what they remember from their thought process about feelings in their spirit, images in their imagination, and languages in their internal dialogue. (Collay) Another type of Constructivist Lesson Plan is The Learning Cycle. It is a three step design which consists of the “discovery” phase, “concept introduction” lessons, and the “concept application”. The discovery phase is where the teacher encourages students to generate questions and hypotheses from working with various materials. The concept introduction lessons is where the teacher focuses the students’ questions and helps them create the hypotheses and design experiments. In the concept application the students work on new problems that reconsider the concepts studied in the previous steps. (Education Broadcasting Corporation, 2004) The third type of Constructivist Lesson Plan was created by Robert O. McClintock and John B. Black from Colombia University Teachers College. It is called The Information Construction (ICON). It contains seven stages: Observation where students observe primary source materials in their natural context, Interpretation Construction where students interpret observations and explain their reasoning, Contextualization where students construct contexts for their explanations, Cognitive Apprenticeship where teachers helps students master observations, Collaboration where students collaborate in observation and interpretation, Multiple Interpretations where students gain flexibility by being exposed to multiple interpretations, and Multiple Manifestations where students gain transferability by seeing multiple manifestations. (Education Broadcasting Corporation, 2004)