Prompt: Based on your reading, would you consider your current instruction style more behaviouralist, cognitivist, or constructivist? Elaborate with your specific mindset and examples.

I would say my instruction style is very much based on what I’m instructing. For example, whenever I teach snowboarding or skateboarding, I strongly believe it is constructivism. I follow that style of instructing heavily. I believe that when you’re learning something active and that has a physicality aspect, the most important thing to know is failure and, from those experiences, learning what you’ve been doing wrong.

For example, when I taught freestyle, the first thing I’d ask my group if they didn’t do it is, “What did you do wrong?” This taught them to actively learn from those past experiences to learn something new. A lot of the times, all I would do is point them in the right direction. Usually, by the end of the season, before I could even ask, they would explain to me what they thought they did wrong.

But if I’m teaching myself or someone else something maybe not as actively stimulating, for example, maybe me and a friend are studying for a test, I tend to follow a cognitivism style of instructing more heavily. I focus on cognitive understanding and creating ways that we can easily remember something. For example, I don’t think I’ll ever forget what BEDMAS is or FOIL. This is just because when there is some easy acronym or rhyme, I automatically know it.

Whenever I’m helping or being helped with something in school, which for the most part is memorization, this form of educating is extremely helpful to me. I sometimes use gum to remember for tests as well. If I am studying, I’ll chew gum, and then later, once I take the test, I’ll chew gum. There was a study conducted showing how recollection of information can be stronger if you’re in an environment where you first learned the information. For example, maybe you learned a niche pocket of information while listening to a song. If you hear that song again, the chances of you recalling that information are greatly impacted.

But to get back to the main point, I think all the styles of instruction can be very useful if used in a setting that benefits from those styles. I can see myself using any instructing style if the opportunity that best suits it arose.

Citations

Godden, D. R., & Baddeley, A. D. (1975). Context-dependent memory in two natural environments: On land and underwater. British Journal of Psychology, 66(3), 325–331. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1975.tb01468.x

Ertmer, P. A., & Newby, T. (2018). Chapter 11 Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Constructivism. Foundations of Learning and Instructional Design Technology West, R. E. (Ed.).

My Responses