ABSTRACT
From 1978 until 1980, I was a participant observer in a professional development project for teachers in the Division for Study and Research in Education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.1 Although we did not refer to it then by this term, the project would certainly qualify as ‘constructivist’. In fact, it was constructivist in at least four different senses. First, it was intended to result in a change in classroom instructional practices toward teachers paying attention to students’ ways of thinking about subjects like science, mathematics, and music. Teachers were to become ‘researchers’ in that they would do local inquiries into their students’ ways of thinking about these domains. The project was designed such that the staff of the program did not ‘tell’ teachers either about the theory of constructivism or about how to apply it in their classrooms. So a second way in which the project was constructivist was that the teachers were to construct their own learning theories by reflecting on how they used and generated knowledge while doing tasks in the domains of music, mathematics, and science. A third constructivist thrust was that the teachers were expected to design methods for applying these theories to their classrooms. The teachers worked on these constructivist activities as a group in weekly meetings over a two year period. They talked about their teaching and about their observations of children, so the project was also a site for the social construction of pedagogical knowledge,2 even though it drew directly on the work of Piaget.3 Finally, the project was constructivist in that the teachers were expected to construct their actions as teachers in face to face encounters with students while conducting research on students’ thinking. We now refer to this way of thinking about knowledge as ‘situative’ or situated cognition.4
