Knowledge Construction

Today's lesson was easy to understand if you didn't look too deep. Yesterday when I was making my review sheet I thought I understood the concepts and had an understanding of how everything fit together. When I came to class this morning I found that everything was a little deeper than I thought. I didn't actually realize how the process worked and the involvement that occurred through everything else. The concept of social construction was confusing in my mind but after we went through it again in class I was able to understand.
The five steps that you placed on the board helped me relate this to the classroom. Because our students are often hardheaded it may be difficult relaying new information that conflicts with a previous schema they have made. We need to convince them that new information is okay and have our students explore new ideas.
The group presentation today introduced a lot of different knowledge construction strategies. We need to do more social construction projects and draw from distributed intelligences. Something I would like to use in my classroom is authentic activities. The check book idea would work well in the other classrooms. Students are always asking "when am I ever going to have to use this" and authentic activities provide solid proof. Having our students explore new situations to solve the problem may not always be the best way to teach but it works in a lot of different situations. It is important to know when to apply this.
Everything we have learned this semester is really starting to click together. We have to be open minded and include a variety of resources in our classrooms to make our teaching effective. We need to build off of other lessons to introduce new material through scaffolding.