poverty

In the math class of veteran teacher Steve Norton, students cut pizza into precise triangles, calculate the volume of ice cream cones (filling them with real ice cream), and throw water balloons at their teacher. Norton wants to show his grade 8 students that algebra can be fun and engage them in ‘learning through doing’. It’s a constructionist approach that engages students in the learning experience, in part, by allowing them to actually construct or do something ‘real’.

Rather than thinking of the brain as a computer, cognitive scientists now utilize a far more flexible, biological analogy, where the brain is seen as a unique, ever-changing organism that grows and reshapes itself in response to use. In this article, John Abbott and Terence Ryan discuss how emerging brain research that supports constructivist learning collides head-on with many of our institutional arrangements for learning.
The article first appeared in the November 1999 issue of Educational Leadership.