Or:

The limitations of practice to improvement

Or:

How to make gravy

 (with apologies to Paul Kelly)

I had intended a post about why I don’t like constructivist pedagogy, and how badly mis-matched it is with machine-stored learning resources.

But guess what?

I had my definition *completely* wrong.

What I thought constructivism meant:

“…instructors should never tell students anything directly but, instead, should always allow them to construct knowledge for themselves.”

(The start of that sentence is actually ‘NOTE: A common misunderstanding regarding constructivism is that…’) (Source)

 What constructivism actually means:

Constructivism is a paradigm or worldview posits that learning is an active, constructive process. The learner is an information constructor. People actively construct or create their own subjective representations of objective reality. New information is linked to to prior knowledge, thus mental representations are subjective.

So that’s pretty cool, actually. Watching a tutorial video on the internet is not contrary to good constructivist practice – according to constructivist theory, the video just lets you add a new, subjectively experienced bunch of stuff to the subjectively experienced bunch of stuff you already knew.

So what’s this about ‘limitations of practice to improvement’ then? Surely, everyone always gets better with practice?

Not, I put it to you, if they’re doing it wrong.

As an example, I give you the ruination of many a family Christmas: GRAVY.

Everyone’s got their own sworn-by technique for making gravy, and yet, it still turns out lumpy more often than not.

My assessment: most people who make horrible gravy do so because they do not understand the theory of gravy, and there is no amount of practice in the world that can fix that.

(Following instructions without comprehension is just as useless. How many times have you followed, but not understood the reasons for, steps in a recipe book? Every time I do that, it ends with me standing in front of a mess and saying ‘I don’t understand what went wrong…’ which is quite telling!)

You might be able to get incrementally better by practising making gravy the wrong way, you might even make quite nice gravy, but you will never make really really good gravy. Making good gravy requires you to understand the processes that result in good gravy, and to use them.

And once you’ve got those processes… well, you can be as creative as you like. You might become a gravy artisan, the Matisse of gravy – but without the chemistry knowledge, never.

(The trick to smooth gravy, it turns out, is preventing water from letting the flour goo up – which means not exposing the flour directly to water. You can do that by coating each grain in a non-water liquid, i.e. a fat, before exposing it to… look, if you’re interested watch how Alton Brown does it, especially with ‘milk gravy’ (bechamael). Alton is a sauce genius. And a saucy genius! What a cutie. Mmmmmm.)

Zoe, could you stop having inappropriate crushes on TV chefs for a minute and tell me how this is relevant to learning resources?

Fine, fine…

I often see folk getting flustered about perceived pedagogical flaws in learning resources – especially video – that have the temerity to just flat-out tell us things.

I don’t think there’s anything to worry about. It’s not just that they can be useful (and that the presenters can be gorgeous) (love your work, Alton), but also that – contrary to my long-held but recently-revealed-to-be-incorrect opinion – they have a perfectly legitimate place within sophisticated, learner-centric pedagogical structures like constructivism.

There’s no harm in telling someone things they need to know, and no particular benefit/some very definite harm in making learners work out *everything* for themselves (that way lies yet another disappointing roast dinner). Of course Being Told isn’t the end of the story – having learned to make gravy is of no use unless you go on to make some gravy – but it isn’t such a bad start.

I know I have a strong – very strong – preference for learning resources that just Tell Me Things. My nine year old neighbour is the same, as are most of my friends, as are many of the high-school students I’ve taught. It’s easy to scoff at this impulse (I’ve done it myself) as being the mark of a lazy learner, or one who wants their learning spoon-fed to them – but is a preference that persistent really so likely to be wrong?

In addition, we – the resource creators and the coal-face educators – don’t really know what learners do after learning by Being Told Things. There are so many uses for learning, do we really want to presume to know how any of it will be applied? Do we want to limit their construction of their own knowledge by assessing only by outcomes? Would doing so even help?

Personally, I usually end up using new learning in ways that the original instructor would never be able to predict – I’m OK with that, I’m pretty sure they’re OK with that, and I’m OK with the metrics not being collected, too.

Confession: I have never actually made gravy

I could (and prior to today, often have) go on and on and on about constructivism without ever actually understanding it properly. No amount of thought-time or creating my own knowledge would have improved my understanding – to learn what the term actually meant, someone had to actually tell me. And there’s nothing wrong with that – in fact, there isn’t even an alternative. In my situation, being flat-out told was necessary.

Now that I know, I can add the definition of constructivism to my big ol’ personally-experienced bundle of knowledge, constructivist-style, and use it think up new, better stuff – I can ‘make better gravy’ than I ever could before.

And it’s true, I have never made gravy. But that coat-the-flour-in-fat technique that I learned from the gravy video? It’s called making a ‘roux’. And two nights ago, I used it as the base of my first ever souffle:

…it didn’t fall down or anything! Pretty good, hey?

 

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