ACTIVITY 1 - Educational Philosophies
ACTIVITY 1 - Educational Philosophies
ACTIVITY 1 - Educational Philosophies
A Progressivist teacher believes that education should focus on the whole child
rather than on the teacher. This philosophy emphasizes that students should test ideas by
active experimentation, and is active not passive. I remember whenever I teach, I don’t
always rely on books and pen and paper activities. I always engage my students in
experiential learning because I have observed that students are challenged and active
whenever they are doing a certain activity first hand. I do not have that teaching style where
the teacher gives everything to the students and spoon feed them. I can also consider
myself as a progressivist teacher because I am not authoritative. I always involve my
students in decision making and planning.
Constructivism in education on the other hand is famous for it has many key
personalities that explained this theory, such as John Dewey (1933), Bruner (1990) and
Piaget (1972).
John Dewey rejected the notion that schools should focus on repetitive, rote
memorization & proposed a method of "directed living" – students would engage in real-
world, practical workshops in which they would demonstrate their knowledge through
creativity and collaboration. Students should be provided with opportunities to think from
themselves and articulate their thoughts. Dewey called for education to be grounded in real
experience. He wrote, "If you have doubts about how learning happens, engage in sustained
inquiry: study, ponder, consider alternative possibilities and arrive at your belief grounded in
evidence."
Piaget rejected the idea that learning was the passive assimilation of given
knowledge. Instead, he proposed that learning is a dynamic process comprising successive
stages of adaptation to reality during which learners actively construct knowledge by creating
and testing their own theories of the world.
A common misunderstanding regarding constructivism is that instructors should
never tell students anything directly but, instead, should always allow them to construct
knowledge for themselves. This is actually confusing a theory of pedagogy (teaching) with a
theory of knowing. Constructivism assumes that all knowledge is constructed from the
learner’s previous knowledge, regardless of how one is taught. Thus, even listening to a
lecture involves active attempts to construct new knowledge.
in order to connect with home and social life. This means that the teacher takes on a dual
role as classroom practitioner and as a professional engaged in the problems, both
epistemological and methodological, of the scholarly community in which they belong, and
as facilitator to construct through a process of dialogue and intellectual self-correction the
experience and knowledge of students into a form that is meaningful so that they become
experts. To these ends the teacher needs to engage students in rich tasks that involve
discussion, investigation, and experimentation (depending on the disciplines), as well as
practical service learning that involves an exchange between proponents of new beliefs and
the rest of the community most directly affected by the social problem in a caring, communal
inquiry so as to actually reconstruct the problem.
George A. Miller has provided two theoretical ideas that are fundamental to the
information processing framework and cognitive psychology more generally. The first
concept is `chunking' and the capacity of short term (working) memory. Miller (1956)
presented the idea that short-term memory could only hold 5-9 chunks of information (seven
plus or minus two) where a chunk is any meaningful unit. A chunk could refer to digits,
words, chess positions, or people's faces. The concept of chunking and the limited capacity
of short term memory became a basic element of all subsequent theories of memory. The
second concept, that of information processing, uses the computer as a model for human
learning. Like the computer, the human mind takes in information, performs operations on it
to change its form and content, stores and locates it and generates responses to it. Thus,
processing involves gathering and representing information, or encoding; holding information
or retention; and getting at the information when needed, or retrieval.
Based on the assessment, my top result is Constructivist, with a score of 23, which
fits to my first self-assessment. Next is Reconstrucionist, with a score of 22. This result made
me realize and remember that I am the kind of teacher who always inculcates social
involvement and reform to my students. I then recall that there were times where I let my
students present or perform that reflected social issues and made inquiries and dialogues
about the things that were happening in the world in that moment of time. I also believe that
the learners have the power to change the world in the future and it is my duty as a teacher
to form and equip them.
Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on
our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63(2), 81–9