Searching for patterns and relationships, say Caine and Caine (1991), is an innate characteristic of the brain. The quest for understanding, for connections, is natural and ongoing. Martin (1970) cautions us, however, that “understanding is not simply a matter of seeing connections: one must ... see the things to be connected as well as the connections between them if one is to understand” (p. 167).
Recently, as part of a collaborative research effort, we had an opportunity to observe many elementary and secondary schools in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Baden-Wurttemberg, and other German states. German schools—never having embraced behaviorism and its emphasis on fragmented knowledge, direct instruction, and reinforcement contingencies to the extent that U.S. schools did—have had a constructivist perspective on learning for some time. Like schools in other European countries, they have emphasized ideas and theories rather than facts and statistics (Stewart 1972).
Students in German schools are aided in making connections that develop and strengthen their internal knowledge structures and build their metacognitive capacity through three important practices: multi-year grouping, community-based curriculum, and responsive teaching.
Multi-Year Grouping
A striking feature of German elementary schools is that heterogeneous groups of students are formed in 1st grade and remain together with the same teacher for the next four years. Multi-year grouping helps students make connections during learning in several ways.
First, teachers develop a firm grasp of students' prior school knowledge because they have been involved in its development. Because of the long-term relationship between students and teachers, knowledge that students have accumulated outside of school is also more apt to become known to teachers.
In addition to prior knowledge, teachers who interact with students over several years come to know the students' preferred ways of learning, behavior patterns, interests, emotional stability, social skills, and so forth. With this knowledge, teachers can plan learning activities, provide materials and resources, and offer appropriate assistance to each child.
Further, multi-year grouping, because it permits students to get to know one another well, facilitates social construction of knowledge. Groups, which possess a collective knowledge, can help individuals to clarify their knowledge and to gain more (Leinhardt 1992). When sympathetic, well-known others are on hand to critique, challenge, and confirm, students gain greater understanding.
Still another advantage of multi-year grouping for developing understanding is what Marzano (1992) refers to as positive attitudes about learning. Long-term relationships result in an emotional and intellectual climate that encourages thinking, risk-taking, and involvement.
When the multi-year group is nested in a small, neighborhood school and parents are actively involved in the life of the school—which is usually the case in Germany—the effects of the family-like group are compounded.
Community-Based Curriculum
The second major feature of German elementary schools is a community-based curriculum, or Gesamtunterricht. In such a curriculum, students engage in an extended, holistic activity based on a community theme that draws on curriculum from the various disciplines. This technique is similar to what Caine and Caine (1991) refer to as immersion.
An example of community-based curriculum in a German 3rd grade class that we recently observed revolved around a local bakery. Previously the students had visited the bakery, they had baked bread in school, and one student's grandmother had visited the class to tell how bread was baked when she was young. On the day of our visit, the teacher continued bakery-related activities for three hours, with only brief interruptions for snacks and recess.
During this time, we watched students construct sentences at the board using bakery terms, create stories about their bakery visit, discuss the history of breadmaking using historical photographs and drawings, and read aloud and discuss selections about bakeries from various books to answer questions they had identified. Then, after some mathematics warm-up exercises, the teacher involved students in multiplication problems related to the bakery. Although textbooks are used periodically in some subjects, they were not used at any time during our visit, nor did we see any tests being administered.
Although German high schools are organized by traditional subject areas, they too engage in community studies to some extent. In addition to exploring ideas in the separate subjects, students examine broad social topics that integrate content, such as water pollution in the Elbe and its tributaries, joblessness in the former East German states, immigration practices in the European Community, nuclear energy after Chernobyl, and health program costs.
Community-based curriculum and integrated subjects contribute to connection-making because they require students to synthesize ideas from many sources. Rather than being inert, the knowledge structures that students form are functional because they relate to real life.
Responsive Teaching
The third major feature of German elementary schools is teaching that emphasizes heuristic rather than didactic techniques, or responsive teaching. Instead of directly presenting information and skills dictated by a textbook or curriculum guide, the teacher's first consideration is students and their present levels of understanding, interest, and ability. Teachers encourage and help students to identify problems or projects. Then, if students need help during an activity, teachers provide a process model, think through an impasse with the student, or offer suggestions. The teacher's response is more like that of a caring parent or group leader than that of a traditional teacher. The help, when no longer needed, is withdrawn. After students solve a problem or accomplish a task, the teacher helps them see what they have learned and the process used. These procedures are similar to scaffolding (as discussed by Collins et al. 1990).
German classrooms are characterized by student independent and group activity and by group dialogue about problem formation, scaffolding, and reflection. Students constantly verbalize their perceptions, impressions, questions, solutions, and speculations.
For example, in a lesson about multiples of various numbers, the 2nd graders experimented with towers of blocks. While building the towers, the students continually spoke about their thought processes. The teacher, in addition to encouraging this sharing, challenged students' discoveries, asked for clarification, and extended their thinking in new directions.
In a 4th grade lesson on community health, the teacher began by displaying a model of the human brain and then asked students to examine the model and describe their impressions. Following their comments—which focused on texture, shape, color, parts, weight, and size—the teacher introduced the topic of the brain's functions and how to research them. Again, a wide-ranging discussion took place. Students voiced research suggestions that were clarified through group interaction. The teacher then asked the students to compare their ideas with the research on brain functioning.
This constant verbalizing enables teachers to see the state of students' internal knowledge structures and thinking processes and to adapt their responses to individual students.
A Constructivist View of Teaching
Undoubtedly, there are German classrooms where one or more of these three features are absent or only occur sporadically, but in general, multi-year grouping, community-based curriculum, and responsive instruction characterize German elementary schools. And we all know of U.S. schools where these three features are used in some form. What separates German and U.S. elementary schools in regard to these features is, perhaps, that in Germany they typically occur in concert and pervade classroom life. As educators in the United States move toward a more constructivist view of teaching, the German model may help us in constructing a comprehensive model of our own.
