Constructivism: Constructing a New Educational Paradigm
This is the second article in a series on Elizabeth Slade’s book Montessori in Action: Building Resilient Schools written for Public Montessori in Action International. You can read the initial article here. In this post, I look at the first “Core Element” of Slade’s “Whole School Montessori Method” - Constructivism.
Our Outdated System
Can you remember way, way back in the late two-thousands when watching TED Talks on YouTube had just become a thing? As a teacher, you couldn’t get through a team meeting without having to watch the latest TED snippet on the future of education or the power of vulnerability. The unchallenged king of this period was Sir Ken Robinson. Still, to this day, he has the most watched TED Talk of all time, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”, with over 75 million views. I think these viewing figures are worth reflecting on; this talk obviously tapped into something in the collective psyche. Perhaps it is because in the talk he uncovered a fundamental truth that many of us intuitively understand and feel deeply - that today’s system of education is fundamentally broken.
However, this isn’t my favorite Sir Ken video. The TED talk of his that I most remember was called “Changing Education Paradigms”, which was accompanied by another great aughties invention, sketchnoting. In this video, Sir Ken vividly details the history of public education and how “the current system of education was designed and conceived and structured for a different age.” I first watched this video around the same time I was starting my Montessori teacher training, so was ripe for rethinking education. In the video, he lays out the ways in which public education today looks much the same way as it did at the turn of the 19th century. Our education system today, he says, “was conceived in the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment, and in the economic circumstances of the Industrial Revolution.” And schools today are still organized along the factory lines of early industrialism - schedules, ringing bells, specialized subjects, children organized by “date of manufacture”, standardized curriculum, and testing, with a focus on input and output. “I believe we have a system of education which is modeled on the interest of industrialism, and in the image of it,” he says.
Alongside this economic imperative was an understanding of human intelligence rooted in Enlightenment philosophy. Sir Ken describes the Enlightenment view of the mind as follows:
Real intelligence consists of this capacity for a certain type of deductive reasoning, and a knowledge of the Classics originally, what we’ve come to think of as academic ability. This is deep in the gene pool of public education. There are really two types of people. Academic and non-academic. Smart people and non-smart people. And the consequence of that is that many brilliant people think they are not because they’ve been judged against this particular view of the mind.
He goes on to detail the devastating impact this has had on children who don’t fit this monolithic model of intelligence, and on divergent thinking in schools in general. “I believe we’ve got to go in the exact opposite direction,” exclaims Sir Ken. “That’s what I mean about changing the paradigm.”
Behaviorism vs Constructivism
In my last article, I discussed Angeline Lillard’s article in Frontiers Developmental Psychology called “Why the time is ripe for an education revolution”, which echoes many of the ideas in Sir Ken Robinson’s video, while also providing a strong research base for these arguments. Both call for a paradigm shift. They identify that just tinkering with our current system is not enough; we need revolutionary change. As Lillard says, “The addenda have not solved the fundamental problem, which is the educational model we employ in schools not comporting well with how children naturally learn.” Like Robinson, Lillard similarly traces the history of our current “educational model” back to the turn of the century, what she calls the teacher-text-centered (TTC) model of education. This model, she explains, is rooted in both an Enlightenment understanding of human intelligence, such as John Locke’s description of the child as a tabula rasa - a blank slate - on which to write, and in the dominant psychological model of the early 19th century, John Watson’s and BF Skinner’s behaviorist model which held that “men are built not born.” It is this behaviorist model of learning that still exists as the main paradigm in education today, even though developmental psychology has long since moved on from it. In the behaviorist model, “teachers change children by providing the conditions (talk, texts, tests, grades) that cause children to learn the information they are told.” Learning is externally motivated.
Just in the same way that our current education system was codified into being at the turn of the 19th century, the solutions to today’s problems in education were born around the same time. “The Future of Education was invented in 1906” reads the genius title of a Forbes article by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry. As with many things in human history, two roads diverged in a wood. On one side was the industrial, behavioral model, and on the other side was constructivism. This counternarrative to the industrial, behaviorist philosophy of learning first emerged in the early 18th century with thinkers like Froebel, Pestalozzi, and Rousseau who proposed a child-centered philosophy of learning that prioritized play, freedom, and time in nature. These thinkers paved the way for other child-centered, constructivists like John Dewey, Maria Montessori, and Jean Piaget. Rather than John Watson’s view that “men are built not born”, constructivists argued that “the child is father to the man” - that learning is intrinsic and self-constructive. That, ultimately, given the right material and social environments, children teach themselves. As American philosopher and education reformer John Dewey wrote in 1897, “True education comes through the stimulation of the child’s own powers by the demands of the social situation in which he finds himself.” As opposed to the behaviorist model, which places the teacher at the center, constructivists place the child at the center of their own learning. Dr. Montessori wrote, “We discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being. It is not acquired by listening to words, but by virtue of experiences in which the child acts on his environment.”
These are not niche ideas. This constructivist model of human development and human intelligence is the one most commonly held in developmental psychology today, whereas behaviorism is widely accepted as defunct in most areas of psychology. In all schools of education, trainee teachers become well-versed in the theories of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, both of which are founded on the idea that children acquire knowledge through active engagement with their environments. Yet despite what we now know about learning, through years of scientific research, despite what we now hold as fact in our universities, the teaching we still practice in our schools remains intractably fixed in an outdated model of learning from the 18th century.
Why Constructivism Is Key
In Elizabeth Slade’s Montessori in Action: Building Resilient Schools she places constructivism at the very core of her Whole School Montessori Method. I find this such a clear and compelling structure for discussing Montessori education at the whole school level. At its core, Montessori education is rooted in this specific educational paradigm. We can sometimes get lost as Montessorians in all of the other aspects of the method, and lose sight of what is most radical and important about Montessori education. Montessori is a completely different educational paradigm - one grounded in the science of learning and human development, or, as Slade puts it, “a system of education based on nature.”
Implementing this constructivist model in schools is very difficult because of how culturally dominant the behaviorist model is. Lillard refers to it as an “attractor” state - “the state to which the system naturally returns” - as many teachers revert to this model because they lack the “necessary structural support to implement something better” and because it reflects their own childhood experience. This is even more difficult in public Montessori education given the external pressures from the larger public school system to implement more traditional methods.
In Chapter 2 of Montessori in Action: Building Resilient Schools, Slade uses an example of how a teacher might approach a child taking more than their fair share of apples at snack time to help explain the difference between a behaviorist and constructivist approach at the classroom level. The “unconscious behaviorist” tells the child they cannot have snack tomorrow because they already had two servings today. The “conscious constructivist” uses a different approach:
The classroom adult approaches as the last of the additional slices is being enjoyed and says to the child, “It looks like you enjoyed your snack.” The child nods, smiling. The adult asks, “Did you know that there are only enough slices for each child to have two?” The child stops smiling. The adult says, “Let me show you how we know that.”
The adult would then proceed to show the child the classroom expectations - maybe a picture of the amount of snack available - and how to interpret them for the future. In the first example, the emphasis is on changing the child’s behavior through punishment, in the second example the emphasis is on understanding the child’s behavior and guiding the child towards self-knowledge. Slade provides further illustrative examples in the book of how these two different approaches can unfold within the same Montessori environment. Even if from the outside a Montessori classroom looks fully furnished and authentic, if the teacher is not practicing constructivist principles then the method falls short. Slade writes:
There are hundreds of small decisions a new teacher must make to set up their multiage learning environment, and without an understanding of how to implement the constructivist approach, their own default thinking will be the driver. Without guidance and reflection on these decisions, the classroom can be using Montessori materials without the benefit of the full implementation of the method.
Slade goes on to discuss how a “synchronized understanding and use of the same framework” needs to be administered at a whole school level for a constructivist approach to be successfully implemented. At a practical level, this means “phasing out programs that include prizes or awards, creating new rubrics for report cards, avoiding practices such as sticker charts or work plans, and countless other possibilities that arise within schools.” It means training and coaching all of your teachers in a constructivist approach so they have a shared language and understanding, and are being held accountable to this new paradigm. It means making observation a consistent practice at all levels of the school. She writes, “This means a commitment to regular observations in classrooms, at transition times, in meetings - across all parts of the school day and every interaction between members of the community to guide living into the method.”
At a more fundamental level, school leaders should constantly ask in what ways a constructivist understanding is underpinning all of their school structures and relationships. For example, if we understand that intrinsic motivation is the driving force of human actions, then how does that inform our relationships with parents and staff? In regards to school policy and practice, Slade writes:
If we understand the value and importance of supporting real change in understanding (cognition) rather than simply looking for a change in behavior (compliance), how does that shape our policies and practices school-wide?
What Slade is proposing here is a way of thinking, a lens or framework through which to view all schoolwide decision-making: “Constructivist systems thinking.” Over the course of her book, she goes on to detail some of the more specific schoolwide practices that follow the constructivist approach, but at this core level we are talking about a set of shared values. Centering this core set of principles then allows a school to build a solid foundation upon which then can operate effectively. In turn, this leads to resilience, as everyone is working towards a common goal: “The resilient Montessori school then is a complex, adaptive system based on the practice of observation and the belief in each person’s right to acquire knowledge through active engagement.”
Finally, I wonder how much power exists in actively labeling our educational approach as constructivist - in locating Montessori within a broader movement for change. I noticed in the Lillard article I mentioned before, “Why the time is ripe for an education revolution”, that she doesn’t just talk about Montessori schools as the future of education, instead she calls the new paradigm in education a Child-Environment Interplay or CEI model. Montessori is the biggest and most successful of these models, but by aligning ourselves with other movements in education that center a constructivist paradigm - such as Waldorf, Lumiar, Reggio-Emilia, and Democratic education - perhaps we would be a more powerful, unified revolutionary force, one that can actively influence policy changes. As it currently stands, we allow ourselves to be easily pigeonholed and dismissed as different “alternative” schools - as experiments - rather than as a serious challenge to mainstream education. This is true even within the Montessori world itself. If we could all get together and work towards the common goal of replacing our current education system with a new paradigm - a new constructivist system - then surely that is all anyone wants for our children and our future.
