The Butterfly's Tongue

Of the following options, which one implies learning to know (learning to learn?

1. Learn the right answers

2. Acquire the relevant knowledge

3. Construct knowledge 

a) Describe your view point of the teacher's role in the previous answer (what should a teacher do?)

In order to construct knowledge, the teacher should promote meaningful and significant activities and cases that children can relate to and understand based on their cognitive abilities and capacities. Also, the teacher must take into account the previous experiences and knowledge of his students to carry out properly the activities so these can be useful for them. Also, the different cognitive styles, learning rhythms, skills and need of students have to be studied before developing the strategies to construct the knowledge.

In order to achieve this aim, teacher should guide student to reflect on the issue worked in class by reviewing it and thinking about how could it had happened, or what are the consequences and why the result of it were the consequences analyzed and not different ones. Therefore, students have to learn from their experience.

The teacher must be conscious about the learning process of the student. He needs to know if his students are achieving the established objectives so he has to ask them questions usually to know if they have learned the contents or not, and has to appreciate the correct answers and lead those student who did not answer correctly to the right question. When a student does not know how to reply to the teacher's demands, the teacher has to be comprehensive with him and show the kid that he has the abilities to understand the concept and answer correctly. He has to motivate students and does not allow them to get down because they have not interiorized contents when his peers have done it easily. 

The acquisition of relevant knowledge is part of its construction. The teacher must teach relevant, important and meaningful contents to the student which are established and detailed in the curriculum of the school. What the teacher should do is find ways to teach it to students so they can notice the relevance of the knowledge by using different means to transmit it as the traditional explanations of the teacher, readings, videos, school trips, conferences, etc. 

Nevertheless, knowledge is no fully learned just by memorizing it. We must construct the knowledge so be can understand it perfectly and can remember it as longer as we want to. To interiorize the new knowledge -construct it- the kid must link the new knowledge to the one that he already has. To success in this construction, the students should have several metacognitivie abilities that allow them to have the control of their own learning in order to organize one's own learning and enrich it. The teacher has to have the certainty that the students are doing this task properly and a way to discover if they are construction their knowledge is, for example, by asking a question in a test that has not been exactly explained in class, a question that goes further so he can observe if a student is able to relate the knowledge that he has to answer correctly the answer. 

The teacher must make sure that the child attributes significance to the knowledge learned in order to integrate it correctly and that can be observable when the kid makes an effort to select only the relevant information that has been taught, organizes it coherently and integrates it with other knowledge that he has. Usually, children who are succeeding in this task are more active and want to demonstrate that they have the knowledge. 

b) Apply this analysis to the teaching situation that is presented in the video of the following slide. 

In this short scene from the film La lengua de las mariposas we can observe how the teacher is trying to construct the knowledge of students by following the strategies stated in the previous question. He wants his students to relate with the contents which they have to learn by making it meaningful so he takes them in a trip so they can see in firsthand the habitat of butterflies and how they extract the nectar from the flowers, and everything they must learn about butterflies in order to integrate the knowledge. While they are observing the butterflies, he explains the theory they have to learn with real examples. That way he is making the knowledge significant and students are going to remember it more and better than if they had studied it inside a closed classroom with just random pictures of butterflies.

Piaget's discussion

We are Clara Girona, Sandra Pérez, Carla Pretel, Judit Serra and Helena Vilella and we have chosen as a name for our group Tangram.

Based on the videos previously seen and our acknowledgement of Piaget’s constructivist theory of learning, we will present our opinion regarding this topic in order for the other groups to understand our point of view and besides, to improve our knowledge in this field thanks to the discussions and exchange of knowledge that will take place with our classmates. 

We will be focusing our attention in two main points which are the acquisition of knowledge as one’s own interpretation or assimilation of the reality and the the sequential process of knowledge construction or, in other words, the developmental stages that all individuals go through their life. 

Knowledge is acquired through the interaction with the different elements that can be found in the mediate context where the individual is immersed. Such elements, usually represented as objects, lead to the stimulation of the different senses and allow the subject to acquire knowledge in a progressive and constant way. It is needed to take into account that all individuals have one’s own way of interpreting and understanding this information. Thus, their interpretation and consequent knowledge will vary depending on their personal experience in this process.

In this way, creativity plays an important role when acquiring knowledge as the wider is the range of opportunities and possible scenarios for each interaction that the individual goes through, the richer will be the learning process that he/she is experiencing. Therefore, in order for children to enrich their learning experience, it is needed to provide them different and varied stimulus that give them the possibility to interact with and acquire knowledge that might be applied in their context.

For this reason, we agree with the Alligators group and their opinion about the knowledge acquisition process, but we believe that a concretion should be made as children do not only learn from objects but from other elements that can be found in their mediate environment too.

In terms of the knowledge construction process, Piaget differentiates four main stages that define the development of the individual. Each of these four stages has its own characteristics in terms of knowledge construction and, as the child goes through them, they become more complex. This four stages are (from simple to complex): sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational. This process is universal, meaning by this that, all subjects move through these four stages. Even so, not all individuals reach these stages at the same age, everyone of them follow their own developmental process determined by one’s own specific rhythm. Clear examples of different rhythms regarding the same developmental process are kids with special needs or disabilities that may found difficulties while trying to reach higher stages. Moreover, there are not only developmental differences in those children with special needs but, as the context and its features also determine this process, those children with lacks in their environment might find developmental difficulties too. 

In order to reinforce our opinion, we have found a video that explains clearly why creativity should be worked at school.

Regarding the developmental stages, here there is another video where all different stages that Piaget defined are shown.