I enjoyed the connections you made in this blog post, Kate. Your journey of learning Spanish illustrates very well the different lenses of behaviourism, cognitivism, and constructivism. I can see how memorization of vocabulary and rules would be limiting. It sounds like the lack of support for learning beyond facts contributed to your lack of confidence at the time. I’m curious if your search for more engaging ways to learn influenced your teacher’s cognitive approach or if their approach and your need was a happy coincidence? Or perhaps, this evolution of need is anticipated by teachers as learners reach a particular point in language learning? In any case, it is clear that the move to cognitive and constructivist approaches allowed you to take your learning to a level where the language was useful for communication. How brave you have to be to put yourself into these situations where you must make many mistakes in order to learn from them.
Integration of the approaches as you describe it for your high school social studies class makes a great deal of sense. As you found from your experience, the foundational knowledge gives a student knowledge and ideas to connect and apply, but the opportunity to make those real world and personal connections is so important to engagement. Would you use a similar structure for an elementary class? Does the level of learning affect how you would balance the approaches?
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