Applying Standards Based Constructivism:
A Two-Step Guide for Motivating Students
Glossary of Terms

This glossary defines terms in the book written by Flynn, Mesibov, Vermette, and Smith with the above title, published in 2004 by Eye on Education, Larchmont, New York. There are two editions, one with elementary examples and the other with examples at the middle and high school grade levels.

For each concept, there is a definition or description taken from the text narrative AND at least one positive and one negative example of it in use in a Social Studies context. Note: these were compiled with the help of Niagara University student teacher Katie Suto, who is a Social Studies major.

Anticipatory Set was a term made famous by Madeline Hunter. It refers to a brief challenge to students that a teacher makes at the outset of a learning experience to try to gather attention and to conjure up prior knowledge. In the Two-Step Model, the expectations of the set are subsumed in the exploratory phase and far more fully developed.

Topic-Labor Unions

YES 1. As the bell stops ringing, the teacher asks the students to think about the impact of a new rule in school: “NO HATS! EVER! She suggests that you and two of your friends think that it is unfair and you are trying to decide what can be done to change it: you opt to go to the Principal. Should you go alone or in a group of four?”

YES 2. As the bell stops ringing, the teacher asks the class to list three ways that a union could seek a raise.

NO 3. As the bell stops ringing, the teacher distributes a newspaper article whose headline is “Union Seeks Raise” and asks the students to read it silently.

NO 4. Any full-blown exploratory phase has elements of the anticipatory set in it; they are analogous to a “starter set”. However, since the exploratory is far more complex and longer lasting, it is by definition a non-exemplar.

Assessment [formative/summative], which can be conducted in many ways, is the purposeful judgment about the extent and quality of understanding being shown by a learner at a particular point in time. Often this judgment is set against rubrics, which are sets of stated indicators of the various levels of demonstrated proficiency.

NOTE: techniques that assess in ways that are conducted with audiences wider than the teacher alone and/or are consistent with OR embedded in real-life tasks or projects are thought to be “more authentic” than ones that are not.

Topic—Civil War

Formative Assessment l. The teacher distributes a fifty item multiple-choice test and says: “We are half-way through this unit. Here is last year’s test, part one. Get it groups and take it without looking up answers. You can work together and you can generate your own guesses. In a half an hour, I’ll give you the answers…and you can check yourself to prepare for next Friday’s real test.”

Summative Assessment 2. “Here is the exam that will count as _ of the semester grade. Please work alone. You will get your scores next week before we start the next unit.”

Formative Assessment 3. “Good morning” says Mrs. Heuer, the teacher: “Today, I’d like to start by having you pair up and complete the ten open-ended sentences that you have about the Civil War. Here, let’s do one together to show you how to get started.” She places the sheet on the overhead: it reads, "The issue of slavery was NOT considered the real cause of the Civil War because …………………………..”. She then proceeds to lead a mini-discussion of possible (and plausible) responses.

Authentic Assessment 4. “Your group will create a journal, one that could have been generated by slaves as they moved for two weeks along the Underground Railroad. We will have these placed in our History Portfolios and read at Parents’ Night during Black History Month.” The class, digging for their books and sources, seemed ready to start when he added, “I will be checking these as I come around during class and I must Ok them personally before we share next week.”

NOTE: This last stipulation suggests that there will be extensive formative assessment as the students work.

Concepts once described as the “central building blocks of human learning,” are best thought of as the ideas and terms with which we think. As such, they do form the basic units by which people also dialogue, compare, and/ or create new ideas:

Topic-Economics

These are all concepts: l. strike, capitalism, communism, socialism, boycott, inflation, recession, investment, prime rate, interest, tax, stock

These are not concepts: 2. Federal Reserve, Keynesian Theory, “trickle-down theory” the New York Stock Market

Constructivism is a theory of learning which holds that learners create their own understandings by actively rebuilding or adding to their existing knowledge base:

Topic-Manifest Destiny

YES 1. During the class time, the seventh graders have been working vigorously on their self developed projects about Manifest Destiny. Each student has a clear plan built around a key question and is either seeking information on the topic or creating a product that will show his or her understanding.

NO 2. The students have a blank map of the US and the textbook and are writing in the dates when each of the following Western lands became states: New Mexico, California, Oregon, Texas, and Utah.

Curriculum Spiral is the intentional inter-connecting of information to be understood across several units or years of study. This approach realizes that ideas that are once understood do impact upon the learning of new material; thus it makes prior knowledge purposeful and real. The opposite, is to see each piece of learning as a unit unto itself. It is relatively common to see teachers teach that way, ending a learning unit and conceptually having the students “put it away” while they go on the next thing

Topic-connecting WWI and WWII

YES 1. The teacher announces, “Please make sure that you have the correct answers for the multiple choice on the WWI unit test; they identify the reasons that WWII begins!!!!”

NO 2. The teacher announces, “Now that you have your WWI tests back you can put them away: we will move on to the next topic, WWII, and remember that there will no questions from this unit on the next test.”

YES 3. The teacher announces: “Here are the reasons that you said people go to war…we made the list as we started the WWI unit” With that, she takes out the large paper and tapes it to the wall. “Were we right ?” she asks. She also adds, “and, you know what ? I wonder if these will be the same for WWII ?”

Engagement is the thoughtful and intentional attempt at making meaning or understanding by a student. In the school context, this is almost always of a “public” nature in that it can be seen or heard by the teacher (p4):

Topic-Legal Issues/Supreme Court Cases

YES 1. The facts of the Lee Yick v. Hastings case are on a handout sheet all students have. Around the room, various groups are hard at work: 4 students are preparing arguments as if they were the government and four are doing the same for the other side. Several are operating as if they were reporters for the San Francisco newspaper and are covering the case. Three are acting as judges who are reviewing cases that can be seen as precedents for this one. Finally, one is comparing paragraphs in various history textbooks about the case--to see if the textbooks show a bias.

NO 2. Teacher passes out handout that lists the facts in the case, the main arguments and the decision. The students are told to look the sheet over at home that night for a quiz the next day.

NO 3. Bill is a junior in American History class and today they are watching a movie about the Supreme Court case. The teacher has asked students to pay careful attention but, in truth, Bill is daydreaming about the weekend….and has been doing so all period.

Graphic Organizer is a visual structured prompt that helps students categorize and connect bits and pieces of information into a more coherent whole.

Topic- Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

YES l. On the front board, the teacher has two big columns; at the top it reads “arguments for” and the other says “arguments against.” The class will create the specifics and then classify them as they debate the wisdom of Truman’s decision to use the Atom Bomb.

YES 2. The teacher gives the class a paper with a design on it that has a center piece marked OPTIONS; lines from that center are available for students to use to create a web of all the possible ptions that Truman may have had as he made the decision.

NO 3. The students read a narrative on their laptops, a lengthy paragraph from the Internet that summarizes the arguments for and against the dropping of the bomb.

Intervention [planned/spontaneous] is a thoughtful and intentional provocation of the students as they are engaged in the learning process:

Topic: American Revolution

Planned Intervention YES 1. Twenty minutes into the time spent working on the projects, the students are interrupted by the teacher, Mr. Smith, who says: “Let’s take fifteen minutes to share what we are doing and to agree on some general guidelines for our projects.” Mr. Smith had anticipated this would be a necessary intervention when he initially planned this activity.

Spontaneous Intervention YES 2. As Mr. Smith walks around the room observing the students work on their newspapers, Smith sees one group adding visuals to their front page. He turns to the entire class and says, “Hey, everyone…what about visuals? These students here, Maurice, Dennis, Tanika and Ramona, are using them and they look great! Do you think that they would help yours, too?”

Spontaneous Intervention NO 3. As the groups work on their newspapers, Mr. Smith walks around looking at what they are producing with no intention to comment or record what he thinks.

Intrinsic Motivation is the self-directed attempt to complete a task, solve a problem or gain from an experience that is driven by a student’s interest or curiosity.
Topic-Underground Railroad

YES 1. The students are given the opportunity to tour a famous historical site, one that is part of the Underground Railroad and they take advantage by showing up on a Saturday.

NO 2. The students participate in an Underground Railroad tour as part of a class trip on a school day.

YES 3. During the tour on a school day, one of the students, Marsha, got very excited and interested in the realities faced by enslaved peoples. At the gift shop she brought a book about the lives of several of the slaves that came through that spot and read it on the bus on the way home and all Friday evening, passing up a chance to go out with friends.

Learning Objective as we use it, refers to the information, facts, skills and competencies that will be assessed by the teacher during a unit of learning. The objective sets the intentional understandings expected of learners and does so in a way that all can see:

Topic-Lewis and Clark Expedition

YES 1. The teacher writes on the board, “Students will understand what people in the Lewis and Clark expedition faced, thought about and experienced and will generate a simulated diary to demonstrate it.”

NO 2. The teacher writes on board, “Students will successfully complete a matching test on information about Lewis and Clark.”

“Research-based” is a phrase that we use often to indicate that the belief or theory being espoused by an educator has actually been explored and supported by the findings of formal professional research (including “action research”):

Topic-ethnocentrism

Note: In the examples offered here, it is NOT the students’’ work that is research-based, but the techniques that the teacher is using. These comments are set in the context of a supervisor-teacher post observation conference and are designed to get readers to think about the use of this phrase.

YES l. Teacher Jones says, “There is research support for the use of non-exemplars in the teaching of a concept for the first time. We can look at the study done by Vermette in l986. I think non-examples of ethnocentrism helped in the lesson I taught today.”

NO 2. “Well,” said the supervisor, “I still think that kids would get confused by the non-exemplars; they don’t seem to help us understand the case they’re looking at…and that is my opinion.”

YES 3. “I believe that there are studies that show that when I experiment with research- supported strategies like cooperative learning….like those done by Johnson and Johnson…it takes awhile to get comfortable. The students' projects will be better next year.”

NO 4. “Well,” replied the supervisor, “it seems to me that I always want some thing perfect before I begin using it. You should, too.”

YES 5. Two weeks later in the faculty room the teacher is telling her colleagues about the unit. “So I set it up and took very careful notes about what was happening. I guess it was action research and I know for a fact that I got longer and more complex essays from them on this topic than I did on any other all year”.

NOTE: the concept of non-exemplar is itself an interesting concept. Since concepts are alinguistic and reside in human minds ONLY, they must be communicated by definitions and by examples. One could argue that Vygotskian dialogue, a constructivist practice, seeks social agreement on what a “term” means. For example, while only Congress can declare WAR (by law) we all accept that undeclared wars in Viet Nam, Korea and Iraq were indeed “war”. This cannot be proven in a scientific sense, but only argued as an accepted logical argument.

Learning to use socially accepted discipline-based terminology is one of the great and critical tasks of secondary schooling, and the examples used in this glossary are neither perfect nor universally accepted. But there is no way other than dialogue to seek to “prove" this.

Thus, the examples that are close BUT not quite acceptable have great teaching power. (See Vermette, l986 for more on this topic); these are Non-Exemplars!

Here are examples of non-examples:

YES l. Some kids think dolphins are fish; they swim and live underwater but are not fish.

YES 2. A bill is a non-example of law: it is just like a law, but it is not a law until it has been passed AND signed!

YES 3. A prairie dog is not a dog; neither is a wolf. They are good non-examples of dog, however.

YES 4. A metaphor is a good non-example of simile and vice versa; they differ only in the use of like or as.

YES 5. Governor is a good non-exemplar of both Mayor and President because they are individual human leaders of the executive branch of different levels of government.

YES 6. A football is in elliptical form; it is not round as a circle is and is therefore a good non-exemplar of round and could be confused for one by young children.

Here are some non-examples of “non-exemplar:” thus, they would not be powerful teaching examples.

NO l. A rock is not a non-exemplar of a trout because they are not even close to being the same and they won’t be mistaken for each other.

NO 2. “President” is not a non-exemplar of law because one is a person the other is an abstraction; they’ll get confused and mixed up but they are not similar to each other as an entity.

NOTE: One final thought: the use of analogies and metaphors are powerful teaching strategies in constructivist settings. Having students compare and contrast two things, identifying similarities and differences shows the logic behind the research-based evidence favoring non-exemplar

Scaffolding is a teacher-designed structure that helps prevent the student from getting too far off track as s/he begins to work with new ideas:

Topic- US Presidents

YES 1. During an exploratory discussion about Presidential events, the teacher passes out a sheet that lists a set of paired words: one is a President’s name and the other is a familiar noun, one that could be seen as a metaphor. The students, working in pairs, are asked to use any resources possible to identify how the metaphor helps understand the history involved. These included the following:

(l) Lincoln-glue stick
(2) Reagan-teflon frying pan
(3)Washington-bricks and mortar
(4) Jefferson-balloon

NOTE: the metaphors are the scaffolds, as are the partners

NO 2. Students are given a list of ten Presidents and asked to look up and write into their notes ONE important accomplishment

YES 3. The students are given a graphic organizer, a t-bar with two columns and are also given a set of possible criteria for judging Presidents. They are asked to choose two criteria and evaluate six Presidents as to whether they meet or fail to meet the criteria.

NOTE: the scaffolds here are the t-bar and the criteria.