Constructivism

After reading through the PowerPoint's and articles on Constructivism, I was left with so much information that I'm having a problem organizing my thoughts! For the most part, what I took out of all that reading was that a constructivist classroom is not one where a teacher stands in front of a room and dictates notes for students to copy all period, but rather, is a classroom that actively engages each student in their learning. Learning, in this type of environment, is a mental process of development, where the students actively learn and build knowledge.
I could not be any more of a supporter of this type of classroom. I am a junior high/high school math teacher and the only way I can get my students to understand my material is by actively engaging them in the problems. Math is a subject that A LOT of students struggle with and I have come to the conclusion that the reason is because most of them can not see the relationship between math lessons and real life. A constructivist classroom is based upon students having prior knowledge about certain topics. Furthering your education in math is also based upon this. Students can only move forward by building upon past knowledge.
One specific lesson that a constructivist approach worked well in was on computing the sale price of items. The point of this lesson was to teach different applications of percents. Students needed to use their prior knowledge on calculations involving percents and apply it to calculating the sale price of an item. The way I introduced this topic was by explaining that we would all be going shopping with coupons and that discounts are based on a certain percentage off of a price. With that, students developed a method to calculating discounts and were actively working together to solve each problem. I was more than satisfied with the way this lesson went because students were engaged, relating math with real-life, and using prior knowledge to answer questions. For me, a constructivist classroom is an effective and successful classroom!