Interestingly, concepts such as scaffolding and the zone of proximal development remain central to constructivism, so much of my previous thoughts on application to instructional design could apply. The shift to being learner focused rather than teacher/instructor focused is more of the vital information (and bring these concepts to the front as well). With Constructivism, there are fun different strategies that encourage students to learn through being active with the material; reciprocal teaching has students act at times as the instructor for their peers, cooperative learning has students work together in groups, and situated learning or anchored learning allowing the students to have a real world scenario/problem to apply the learning. Encouraging collaboration and teamwork appears to be central to constructivist strategies (UMGC, 2024).

Constructivism in higher education has a lot of benefit. With a heavy focus in strategies on real life scenario/application, learners have less opportunity to complain about how this applies to them or when they will use it. This can make the material more digestible at times and more can help motivation rather than discourage them as the knowledge appears useful rather than frivolous. In higher education, you are tasked more and more to be independent in your learning, so learning how to be active in your own learning is important. A college aged student is not going to be successful without motivation and actively seeking out the knowledge of the material.

An example I think of for constructivism is from a language class. We were paired up typically and tasked with working together to practice the lesson. Each student would pass the duty of instruction between each other, you were responsible for listening for pronunciation, enunciation, and grammar during the speaking sections. We would work together and build off of any mistakes or successes. This experience helped us all learn better than the typical repeating of phrases back with the instructor. It gave us a more personal and intimate practice where we could receive feedback and improve, as well as allowed us to instruct our peer. That instruction did just as much for learning the language as the practice.

Having students working in groups to do reciprocal teaching or crafting real world scenarios require more time and resources than typical lecturing and questions. Constructivism placing so much emphasis on the learner does create an issue where not all individuals are the same and have different experiences and motivations (Bates, 2022). For a heavily social system of learning, variance could occur with groups. Anytime dealing with groups there is the fear of groupthink (Brau, 2022).