Discussion as a Method of Teaching
Traditional teaching in the United States - as in other developed, industrialized nations - has been based on a hierarchical model in which a teacher has all of the authority in the classroom and in which students learn through rote drills and memorization of the facts that the teacher presents to them. However, while some types of knowledge are best conveyed in this traditional fashion (such as irregular verb formations and mathematical formulae), for most other types of knowledge an non- traditional form of learning is both more enjoyable and more productive. This is certainly true of the ways in which nurses should be educated: Some facts must simply be memorized but most of nursing education must be conducted through a more active, engaged approach to learning There are many different forms of non-traditional - i.e. non- hierarchical - teaching and learning. Perhaps the most important (and one that has certainly won wide-spread acceptance in many universities today) is Constructivist teaching. Constructivism is based on the idea that learning is as natural to humans as breathing air. We can't help doing
Another way that this word can be understood (and the authors rightly note that it is etymologically linked to Archimedes's cry of "Eureka!", a paradigmatic example of the learner suddenly reaching out to the world to make it make sense) as teaching not numbers or thinking in school, but the science of learning, the science of problem-solving. This original shift away from traditional, heavily hierarchical models of education towards ones in which students were given greater freedom as well as greater responsibility would lead educators down a path that was itself an old one, at least in the realm of philosophy if not of primary education - the idea of heuristics, or "the art of intellectual discovery" (Kafai & Resnick, 1996, p. Indeed, he argues that the only way in which it is possible to educate adults within such fields as nursing is to organize classroom time around such interactive strategies as discussion This concept of actively constructing knowledge by using discussion and hands-on learning activities rather than lectures is based on the theories of psychologist Jean Piaget. The Constructivist model of learning assume that the way in which humans learn about the word is through actively exploring that world and constructing models about how things in the world work (Halpern, 2002). Brookfield and Preskill (1999) argue that the standard way in which nursing education has been performed - the lecture - is one of the least useful methods of conveying the needed knowledge and especially the needed skills. A traditional approach to teaching may be summarized in the following way: Traditional education sees intelligence as inherent in the human mind and therefore in no need of being learned. Constructivism is a philosophy of learning based on the concept that when individuals learn they do not passively acquire or absorb a new understanding. Bastable (2003) emphasizes how this model of education can be used by nurses to help encourage patients to become active partners in their own health care. Discussions among students and between students and their instructors, on the other hand, tends to create the kind of engaged practice in critical thinking that nurses will need throughout their professional lives. This shift toward new forms of active learning has been extended by the current emphasis on adult education as well as - as Lowenstein & Bradshaw (2001) suggest - the ways in which technology is now integrated into the curriculum. This fact led him to argue that the aim of education should not be only to instruct, but to provide a formative milieu for the child's indissociable intellectual, moral and affective development - not just to furnish the mind, but to help form its reasoning power. Constructivism at the same time as modern methods of scientific discourse were being developed, which is no doubt one of the reasons that it provides such a good fit with nursing education.
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Acceptance Essays
