The constructivist approach to lesson planning focuses on how students build their understanding through experiences and reflection. This model emphasizes active learning and promotes individualized meaning-making, where students construct knowledge based on their experiences, prior knowledge, and interactions with the world.

Here’s a guide to incorporating a constructivist approach into lesson planning. It emphasizes individualized meaning-making and utilizes multiple ways of understanding and representing knowledge, learning rooted in authentic situations, cooperative learning, and performance assessments.

Steps to Create a Constructivist Lesson Plan

The educational environment fosters students’ inquiry, and questions are recognized as an essential window into students’ thinking and as the opening for further learning. Learning is thought to not happen in a vacuum but occurs with a great deal of information stored and added.

Cognitive development is believed to be a dynamic process where individuals construct knowledge through interaction with their environments. Individuals connect new information to what is already there to make sense of the latest information. (Piaget)

The instructor’s role is more of a guide or a coach who creates spaces for students to grapple with the content and make individual meaning. Teaching and learning is focused on the student. The curriculum is organized so that students continue to build upon what they know and have learned over various grade levels.

Identify Learning Goals and Outcomes

While behavioral lesson plans utilize behavioral objectives, they are defined in broad learning ways that allow for flexibility in how students achieve them. The learning aim is focused on the student, not the instructor, in planning and the day-to-day curriculum. This is known as emergent understanding.

Although direct instruction may be used, it is limited and not the central focus of the lesson plan. Instead, the students are presented with knowledge learned from the lesson in a meaningful, engaging, and purposeful way. The focus is on skills like critical thinking, problem-solving, and real-world application rather than rote memorization.

The instructor does not share a set of objectives at the start of the lesson. They do not start with “I can…” statements or learning targets before the lesson begins since part of being engrossed in the learning experience is constructing one’s language around the concepts.

These objectives are similar to behavioral objectives, which include the audience, behavior, and conditions (ABC) before the lesson is given to guide the lesson structure. The conditions are the tangible product the students will produce to allow the instructor to assess whether they have learned. How the students illustrate their understanding of that skill may vary.

Build on Prior Knowledge

The learning process and outcomes are varied and relate to the specific students. The instructor writes emerging understandings specifically with the students’ background knowledge. Start by assessing what students already know about a topic. Assessments may be internally or externally created, but they should encourage students to display their learning in various ways.

Encourage students to share their experiences, beliefs, and understanding to connect to the new material.

The scaffold learning technique introduces each step gradually, offering more support initially and reducing it as the student masters each stage.

Create Real-World, Meaningful Tasks

Real-world tasks developed or related to a student’s lives or interests. Students can be engaged in authentic, hands-on activities encouraging exploration, investigation, and creativity. For example, in a geometry lesson, students might design a building or create a model based on fundamental architectural principles.

Facilitate Active, Student-Centered Learning

Guide discussions, work in groups, and engage in independent research to encourage students to participate actively in the learning process. Open-ended questions to stimulate thinking and discussion. This encourages collaboration through group projects or discussions but balances this with opportunities for individual exploration and reflection.

Encourage Reflective Thinking

Opportunities are created for students to reflect on their learning process. Journals, discussions, or visual aids allow students to document their thought processes and how their understanding is evolving.

Adapt Learning to Individual Needs

Students provide multiple pathways for students to express their understanding (e.g., through writing, art, presentations, etc.). Differentiated tasks cater to students’ unique learning styles, strengths, and interests. Students are then allowed to take ownership of their learning by letting them choose from various projects or inquiry-based activities.

Promote Scaffolding and Gradual Autonomy

Start with guided support but gradually reduce this as students become more confident. Tools and resources are provided, but students are encouraged to make their own decisions about using them.

Encourage Social Interaction

Constructivist learning often occurs through social interactions and peer collaboration. Group work or peer review activities where students can discuss and challenge each other’s ideas, helping them clarify their thinking, are used.

Assess Meaning-Making Through Multiple Forms

Move beyond traditional tests and quizzes. Instead, use assessments that reflect the depth of students’ understanding, like portfolios, presentations, projects, or concept maps. Students evaluate the final product, the learning process, and engagement with the material.

This approach encourages students to construct meaning based on their experiences and how they interact with the subject matter while meeting the learning objectives.

EEL DR C Lesson Planning Model

This constructivist approach lesson planning model helps map out a constructivist lesson. EEL DR C is an acronym that stands for:

Enroll

It informs why the learning objective is important. Ideally, it is multimodal, where auditory, visual, and kinesthetic learning might occur. Storytelling, multimedia, role-playing, response to questions, a skit, or a pantomime are all effective ways to enroll.

Experience

Instructors create space for students to experience the content to be learned in that lesson. This is an initial exploration of what will be grappled with later in the lesson. It is designed to tap into the students’ natural curiosity, create engagement, and allow them to make individual meaning of what is being learned. Small group activities, games, and simulations are driven by the content being taught, and where instructors can draw on any pedagogical tool to engage their students.

Label

These are used to label what the students just experienced. The instructor may identify group mini-lessons, instructor demonstrations, and other instructional techniques to provide new information on what has been learned and deepen the grappling with content. Emergent understandings are introduced. The modification is that we are satisfying the curiosity created through the experience. This should have led the students to generate questions. Labeling makes learning more vivid and memorable.

Demonstrate

After providing new information, the instructor creates a space for students to demonstrate their learning with a small group activity. The student can apply the latest knowledge by practicing the new behavior or skill demonstrated through a collaborative handout. Guidance (conferring) and ongoing feedback (formative assessment) are provided, and the instructor checks in for understanding, asks questions and pushes students’ thinking on the demonstration of learning. Creating videos, co-writing stories or essays, team skits, graphic representations, or creating board games are all ways to demonstrate activities.

Review

Instructors create a space for students to review the ideas explored to strengthen the connections made to schemas, reinforce their learning, and provide valuable formative information to the instructor about the needed next lessons. Reviews can be elaborate, such as students playing review games or teaching what they learned to peers, responding to a prompt on an exit ticket, turning to a peer and reviewing learned information, or drawing a learned concept on a piece of paper.

Celebrate

Instructors close the lesson by honoring the students’ efforts, successes, and abilities. This allows instructors to build students’ confidence and increase their learning motivation by celebrating successes, including student effort. Instructors can then share what is next in the unit study or tie up any loose ends before concluding the lesson. Some examples include high-fives, team chants, or verbal praise from the instructor or student-to-student.

This constructivist approach lesson planning model focuses on student learning styles, individual motivation, and multiple intelligences. It engages students while accommodating as many learning modalities as possible. This model encourages instructors to consistently deliver scaffolded, multisensory content with several opportunities for students to process and store information.

Constructivist Approach Assessments

Students are often evaluated by multiple means of representing their learning with the instructor, sometimes providing choice. The lesson should incorporate myriad intelligences and learning modalities. Students can utilize spatial (drawing diagrams), linguistic (recording in journal), interpersonal (working in groups), intrapersonal (exit ticket), bodily-kinesthetic (enroll and experience activity), logical-mathematical (measuring diameter), and naturalist (outdoor activity) intelligence.

The constructivist approach creates opportunities to apply, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate content. It provides an excellent pathway for motivation, engagement, and personalized meaning around common concepts. However, it can also be very time-consuming and inefficient. It facilitates experiences for idiosyncratic or multiple outcomes.

Example: Individualized Meaning-Making in a Constructivist History Lesson

Topic: The Industrial Revolution

Prior Knowledge Activation:

Ask students to brainstorm what they know about the Industrial Revolution, connecting it to modern technology or industries they are familiar with.

Real-World Task:

Students could be assigned to research how a particular invention (e.g., the steam engine) changed everyday life. They can compare it with a modern equivalent, like electric vehicles.

Active Learning:

Students work in groups to create a multimedia presentation on their chosen invention, including a visual timeline, interviews with family members about technology in their time, or a creative short film reenacting historical events.

Reflection:

After presenting their projects, students write a reflection on how their understanding of technological progress has evolved and how their personal experience shapes their view of history.