Common Knowledge Construction Model
Overview
The Common Knowledge Construction Model, by Jazlin V. Ebenezer's & Sylvia Connor, is a constructivist model to facilitate learning. It is a very good structure for planning and instruction as well as guiding educators in their reflection of student achievement and their professional development.
The model's instructional design is closely aligned with a constructivist learning theory. This match of instruction to how people learn is powerful to guide teaching and to facilitate learning. The same combination provides a beneficial framework for teachers to reflect on their teaching and their student's learning and for their students to assess their learning progress.
Uses of the Common Knowledge Construction Model
The exploration of the common knowledge construction model considers how it explains how people learn; and how it can guide educator's planning, teaching, and instructional methodologies. See also General teaching model overview and other teaching syntaxes.
Teacher's use
Teachers use a common knowledge construction model to
1. Understand (learn) and facilitate construction of their content knowledge as well as the different ways their students and other learners understand the content knowledge.
- Construct information they know.
- The processes they use to learn it.
- How they learn.
- The development of understanding for a topic. and
- Intellectual development in general.
2. As an instructional model to make informed decisions on how to guide students in their personal construction of knowledge about their world.
Student's use
Students use a common knowledge construction model to actively construct knowledge about a topic they are investigating and to understand the process of learning in general.
Processes of constructing knowledge (learning)
- Explore
- Categorize
- Construct
- Negotiate
- Translate
- Extend
- Reflect
- Assess
These processes and their interactions are represented in the following diagram and each is described next.
Exploring and Categorizing processes
Teacher continuously explore and categorize their understanding by questioning and reflecting.
- What do I know about the information?
- What do learners know?
- What more do I need to know about the topic?
- What data do I need to collect about what students know about the topic?
- How does the information I know categorized within an accurate hierarchy of knowledge.
- How does the information students know categorized within an accurate hierarchy of knowledge.
Teacher continuously explore and categorize their instructional methods.
- How do I provide activities for students to explore their understanding of particular ideas?
- How do I help learners fit their explorations into their categories of understanding and information.
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Use instructional strategies such as:
- Choose a relevant engaging activity
- Use materials to explore ideas
- KWL chart (know, want to know, Learn)
- POE strategy (predict, observe and explain)
- Provide a risk free environment
- Students communicate their understanding in multiple ways to other students and their teacher.
Students continuously explore and categorize their understanding.
- Students explore what they know about an idea and explain that understanding within what is happening related to an introductory activity.
- Students explore what additional information might be helpful to expand their understanding.
- Ask. What previous experiences might fit within the same categories of this information or does a new category need to be created?
Constructing and Negotiating
Teacher continuously Construct and Negotiate their understanding.
- Constructs meaning for what they know about the idea or topic and negotiate how they know it and how they might better know it.
- Constructs meaning of what students know about the idea or topic and negotiate how they know it and how they might better know it.
Teacher continuously Construct and Negotiate on their instructional methods.
- Plans how to help students construct and negotiate meanings from the information collected and categorized during exploration.
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Use instructional strategies such as:
- Problem solving activities
- Cooperative learning
- Discrepant events
- Classroom discussion
- Create visual and written representations
- Analogies
Students continuously Construct and Negotiate their understanding.
- Students use previous ways of knowing or create new ways of knowing that explains what is happening. By asking questions such as:
- How do I communicated what is happening?
- How can I test the validity of my ideas?
- How do my ideas compare to others?
Translating and Extending
Teacher continuously Translate and Extend their understanding by questioning and reflecting.
- Compares student's ideas to the accepted understanding and decide if the students' understandings are accurate and developmental appropriate. If not, decide how to help students translate or extend their understanding to make them more accurate or create a deeper understanding.
- Decide how to help students translate and extend their understanding and information to connect to other ideas.
Teacher continuously Translate and Extend their instructional methods.
- Plans opportunities for students to translate and extend their understanding for accuracy, deeper understanding, higher levels of understanding, and make connections to other areas.
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Use instructional strategies such as:
- Make connections to real life
- Make connections to other subject areas
- Relate to technology
- Apply to problem solving situations
- Ask for more detail
- Ask what is the bigger picture
- Ask. How can you use this?
Students continuously explore and categorize their understanding.
- Students translate and extend new ideas and information to other previous ideas to make the new information more useful.
- Translate and extend ideas to other ideas.
- Relate their ideas to the ideas of experts in related fields.
- Ask. How can I use what I have learned in my life?
- Ask. Are there other ways of understanding what I understand?
- Ask. How might others use this information?
- Ask. Could this be used in other ways?
Reflecting and Assessing
Teacher continuously reflect and assess on their understanding.
- Ask. Does this make sense?
- Is this what students are really understanding?
- Is their understanding accurate?
- Are they developmentally ready to understand more?
- Can I organize the different ways students understand into a developmental hierarchy, from naive to expert understanding?
Teacher continuously reflect and assess their instructional methods.
- Ask. Is this going to help students learn?
- What might work better?
- What is the least I can do to facilitate student's learning?
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Use instructional strategies such as:
- Ask. How can the information they learned be used?
- Plan activities where students have to use what they learned to solve a problem.
- Use literature and media or make up a situation and ask students if what they learned could be used to understand the situation and how.
- Ask students to interpret their communications and other communications.
Students continuously reflect and assess their understanding.
- Ask. Is this making sense to me?
- How can I use what I am learning?
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