The Use of Metaphor and Technology to Enhance the Instructional Planning of Constructivist Lessons

Abstract

This paper describes how a teacher educator used a Computer Applications for Educator's preservice education course to teach constructivist lesson planning to students who were in the process of planning lessons. It was hypothesized that by providing scaffolding and coaching during the planning process, preservice teachers could be guided to learn to produce constructivist lessons. This type of learning experience follows Vygotsky's (1978) suggestion that constructivist teaching can be a social activity that involves "problem solving under [teacher] guidance" (p. 86). Because constructivist lesson planning requires creative thought that novice lesson planners often find difficult to do on the spot, the "Interactive Lesson Planner" was developed to provide scaffolding so that students would have speedy access to lesson resources via the Internet ( Holt, 2000; Klein, 1997; Mintrop, 2001). Students were also taught how to post their resulting lessons to the Internet. By doing so, students preserved their efforts so that they may be applied in the future to the student-teaching experience and as a way to market themselves online to potential employers. Because this approach follows John Dewey's suggestion that the teaching and learning process should attempt to solve real-world problems, it was hypothesized that this would enhance motivation (Dewey, 1916). Seventy-five percent of students taught with this approach successfully applied constructivist lerning theory by completing a constructivist lesson on their own.