Fuller Circles
It has been noted that newborn babies are entirely dependent upon someone else to clothe, feed and change their diapers. And if that baby is lucky enough to live a long life, the same dependencies may again reappear in old age. This, I suppose, is the circle of life.
Like life, I think formal schooling’s approach to learning also completes a circle. A good early learning program will have a very constructivist approach, with an open and negotiated curriculum design. Advanced university degree programmes are also highly constructivist with learners formulating their own research questions and professors only serving as guides to the ‘answers’. In between, formal schooling often has varied degrees of more content-driven, prescribed curriculum framed by standards. In other words, you start with constructivism, and if you are lucky enough to survive formal schooling long enough you go back to it. Perhaps the Greeks had something like this in mind as the original word “curriculum” comes from the Greek word for ‘race track’.
The latest brain research provides another perspective on this observation. From birth to age five, humans experience a major synaptic growth period. Neural pathways are being formed and a constructivist approach to learning can harness these natural processes. But there is second, massive growth period that gets less press.
One of the most significant findings of modern neural research is the high level of synaptic growth that occurs in adolescents between the years of 10-15. Adolescents go through a massive phase of neural growth at this time, and when you throw in the concurrent (and legendary) hormonal changes into the mix, the challenges of educating this group cannot be under-estimated. Middle school students are not simply short little high school students, nor tall primary students, they form their own distinct cohort and we are only beginning to recognize how different they are.
I would suggest then, that if one were to look at the academic education continuum and map this against neural development, there should be three key phases of strong constructivist emphasis: year 0-5; 10-15; advanced degrees. (The latter is justified not by brain research but instead by the assumption that a learner capable of advanced degree work has been fully readied for the challenges of full-on constructivism.) More prescribed and content driven curriculum should fit around these periods. Thus, when the brain’s pathways are being developed, we should try to maximize this process. Outside of these times, we should be aiming more to ‘fill the bucket’ with content knowledge and pushing students to develop their cerebral muscles in the form of higher level thinking skills. Unlike most other schools around the world who are bound by political mandates and other restrictions, international schools are uniquely positioned to lead in this area. I hope we do!
