Teaching and learning are not synonymous; we can teach, and teach well, without having the students learn.

Until recently, the accepted model for instruction was based on the hidden assumption that knowledge can be transferred intact from the mind of the teacher to the mind of the learner. Faculty members focused their attention finding more efficient methods of moving on getting knowledge from their professorial heads into the heads of their students, and educational researchers tried to find better ways to affect the transfer.  Unfor­tunately, all too many of us who teach have informally discovered support for George Bodner’s hypothesis:

Teaching and learning are not synonymous; we can teach, and teach well, without having the students learn.

Rather than focusing on the process of teaching, we must consider the ways in which students learn.  Most cognitive scientists now believe in a constructivist model of knowledge that attempts to answer the primary question of epistemology, "How do we come to know what we know?" This constructivist model can be summarized in a single statement: Knowledge is constructed in the mind of the learner.

The purpose of this workshop is to introduce a "radical" constructivist model of knowledge and to explore how this model relates to helping students to learn, and to explore how constructivism can help us to under­stand really happening in our class­rooms through the lens of the Learner-Centered Psychological Principles: A Framework for School Reform & Redesign published bt the American Psychological Association.