I had an interview with a PhD student today that got me to thinking about various instructional philosophies. Now, I must say that this is somewhat unusual for me, since I happen to think that all three philosophies mentioned in the title of this post (a) are weakly supported (at best) by what little we know about how people actually learn, (b) usually misapply what we do know in practice, and (c) generally net me little practical gain in my design for the effort.
That said, they are not entirely without their uses, and this particular PhD student got me thinking by asking an interesting question: When do you employ each of these philosophies in your instructional designs? What I like about the question is its pragmatism. It suggests that constructivism, cognitivism, and behaviorism are all perspectives that you try on to achieve specific goals rather than fundamentally correct or incorrect positions about how human beings learn.In the course of the conversation, I discovered that I do, in fact, have a coherent approach regarding when to use each of these philosophies (consciously or unconsciously) with my corporate clients, and it comes down to how I think the sponsors mentally model the cognitive domain of the course and the roles of the participants in relation to that particular knowledge domain, not so much because the “customer is always right” as because their mental model ends up driving their learning objectives and ROI measures in some pretty comprehensive ways.
For example, constrictivist techniques are mainly useful in collaborative courses where the content is cutting-edge and the participants are perceived to be high-value knowledge workers within the domain. Even though the sponsor usually doesn’t actually believe that meaning is socially constructed, there is enough doubt about what is “true” that the sponsor hopes the collected brainpower of the participants will flush out truth through open-ended dialogue. (In fact, many times these courses will double as strategic planning sessions.) The net effect is an instructional strategy that is broadly compatible with constructivism even if the underlying intuitions of the sponsors are fairly objectivist. Here are a few courses that might qualify for a kind of pseudo-constructivist treatment:
- A course on constructing synthetic securities taught by a Wharton professor to hedge fund managers
- A course on early interventions for stroke victims taught to senior emergency room physicians
- A course on leadership taught to senior managers
In contrast, cognitivist techniques are generally useful for bread-and-butter knowledge worker courses where the sponsor believes that there is a right way of doing things (or at least, a better way of doing things) but where figuring out best practices for a given situation can be complicated. The goal is to get the participants to apply well-defined best practices more effectively in a complicated work environment.
Examples:
- A course on HIPAA regulations and their impact on writing medical charts taught to emergency room physicians
- A course on early interventions for stroke victims taught to emergency room admitting nurses
- A course on financial business analysis taught to middle managers
Behaviorist techniques are the bottom of the barrel, both in terms of types of tasks and in terms of the perceived status of the learners as knowledge workers. These are cases where imitation is sufficient and innovation is generally seen as a negative.
Examples:
- A course in entering patient chart information into the computer for hospital desk personnel
- A course on how to use Outlook 2003 for anyone who wants to take it
- A course in phone ettiquette for customer service call center workers
OK, so this pokes at a hot-button issue for me, which I should write up and send to ETR&D ’cause it riles me up so much. If only my dissertation did 🙂
The epistemologies of the title are just that — beliefs about how, fundamentally, people learn. Now, there are also some instructional strategies that happen to be stronly tied to each of them, but they are two very different things. You point at this when you say, e.g., “Constructivist techniques”, but it’s a point, I think, worth beating like the dead horse that it is.
The problem is clearly mine, but it drives me nutso when people ask me, “How can I use constructivism? What good is it to me?” One could as that about PBL, of course, but any PBL session could just as easily be an instantiation of constructivist principles as cognitivist principles.
The reason I think the distinction is important is this: everyone *has* a set of beliefs about how learning occurs. When someone says they’re “eclectic” or “just use what works in the situation”, what they’re telling me most of the time is that they don’t understand their own view of learning and hence don’t know how it’s affecting their instructional decisions.
Most people, if they’re honest with themselves, won’t have a personal epistemology that fits nicely into the cannonical writings surrounding one of the concepts of the title. And for most of us, hopefully, our view of learning changes as we get more experience and reflect on more things. But when people reduce beliefs about learning to a fleeting preference for some set of methodologies, well, they’re missing a chance to think things through in a way that can have serious pedagogical effects.
I know it’s not nice for my first post to be a rant, but there it is. 🙂
Actually, Bill, I think that you and I agree on a lot (including the positive intellectual and cathartic value of the occasional rant). I agree completely that both methodologies and theories of the mind (which, as you correctly point out, are related but distinct from each other) are far too critical to regard as only colors on the pallette of the instructional-designer-as-Artiste. In fact, my main reason for being somewhat dismissive of today’s learning theories as promoted in educational circles is that I think they generally take their grounding in the cognitive sciences far too casually and sloppily. (This is a gross overgeneralization, of course.)
It’s really astonishing how little we really understand about how people learn and how much of what we do know is on such a low level (e.g., how our brains identify shapes in the visual cortex, how we segment voice sounds into language phonemes, etc.) It is very, very hard to map what we actually know about the basic processes onto the incredibly complex pragmatic situations involved in most real-world learning. Much of what passes for theory in cognitivist, constructivist, and behaviorist learning liturature can more accurately described as inspired by cognitive sciences rather than empirically supported by them.
Nevertheless, we have to make principled pedagogical decisions based on what we do know, right? Often times, this comes down to relying on intuition. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this by itself, because I tend to believe that intuitions are often motivated by coherent (or at least semi-coherent) theories of learning that are mostly tacit knowledge. If we can find the method in those intuitions then we can evaluate the extent to which it is a method worth repeating and expanding (i.e., we can turn the method into a methodology).
My original post was very much in this spirit; I was observing that my own intuitive method bears some resemblance to each of the three schools of thought at various times and, furthermore, that there is a systematic pattern in my intuitions that is tied to the ways in which the instructional goals are set for the class by the sponsors. I learned something from that observation and will probably think about it the next time I sit down to design a course. Is it cognitive science? No. Does it mean that we can throw cognitive science out the window when we think about teaching? Of course not. But in absence of a theory of learning that I feel confident is both strongly grounded in empirical evidence (or even empirically provable or disprovable in principle!) and practically applicable to the every-day tasks of course design, learning from the systematic intuitions of experienced practitioners seems like as good a place to start as any when searching for a methodology.