SCHOOL OF EDUCATION’S PHILOSOPHY, BELIEFS AND GOALS

The unit’s philosophy is built on the fundamental belief that all school-aged students can learn.  This belief incorporates the idea that these learners are unique and capable students who reach success in a safe learning environment where the instructional focus is on building communities of learners. These learning communities reflect collaborative and experiential inquiry with students, parents, colleagues, administrators, and community members. The unit is guided by this fundamental belief which integrates the knowledge of best practices for preparing teacher candidates, focusing on state and national standards. To this end, the unit’s faculty developed four goals/outcomes for the professional programs in the unit.  These goals are expressed as professional outcomes:  competent, collaborative, caring, and reflective. Teacher candidates must exhibit these outcomes upon program completion and are assessed throughout the program on the unit’s assessment instruments.   

The unit’s teaching philosophy aligns with constructivist learning theory. Jonassen (1994) proposed seven tenets of constructivist learning environments that best describe the unit‘s understanding:

• represent the natural complexity of the real world
• focus on knowledge construction, not reproduction
• present authentic tasks, contextualizing, rather than abstracting instruction
•  provide real-world, case-based learning environments, rather than predetermined instructional sequence
• foster reflective practice
• enable context and content-dependent knowledge construction
• support collaborative construction of knowledge through social negotiation, not competition among learners for recognition. (p. 35)

The unit recognizes the complexity of constructivist theory. We use and integrate cognitive and social branches of constructivist learning theory in order to best meet the diverse learning styles of our teacher candidates. A brief overview of the unit’s understanding of cognitive and social constructivism is provided.

Based on the work of Piaget (1952), cognitive constructivism focuses on the individual learners’ need and not the learner in a social context (Oxford, 1997).   Piaget’s work centered on the processes of the individual’s understanding: “we must study its {knowledge} formation rather than examining only the end product” (Kamii & Ewings, 1996, p. 260).  On the other hand, social constructivism brings together the work of Piaget with that of Bruner and Vygotsky.  Social constructivism views each learner as a unique individual with diverse needs and backgrounds that are shaped by the social context of the learning situation (Bruner, 1997; Phillips, 1995: Wertsch, 1997; Wood, 1998). 

Based in the unit’s philosophy, unit’s faculty developed four professional outcomes for the professional programs: competent, collaborative, caring, and reflective. The four outcomes are what we believe our candidates must demonstrate upon program completing and are supported by our research based discussed below.