Yes, I consider lecturing and cognitivism very good for certain subjects, like history (of cereal) and science (of the universe). I love stories. One of my best teachers ever was Mr. Clark. I took Astronomy, Physics, Geology, and Environmental Science from him, and he was a lecturer. He showed a lot of slides, too though. But he had such a great voice and a great vocabulary that you could picture in your brain exactly what he was talking about. You could create the system and manipulate it and understand it just by hearing him talk about it. Last semester I took History of Creativity and the professor did a very good job simply telling the story of history. I didn't do awesome in the class but it was somewhat of a miracle that the two and a half hours of lecture didn't kill me. I love stories.
But lecturing and cognitivism aren't everything, especially in what I want to teach. I'm a big fan of projects, but projects with tough criteria. It's a difficult balance, because some projects it's like the teacher wants one specific thing from all the students, other times the teacher has no criteria so you have no direction. Constructivist as it may sound, I'm going to slip into a little bit of behaviorism. Last year in industrial design we had a few design assignments due every day of class, twice a week. Each one had its own set of criteria to follow. Sometimes extremely specific, other times more open. At the end of class we had our final design project that had zero criteria, except that it be done in Adobe Illustrator and on 8.5"x11" paper. It would have been difficult to come up with something, but I had been conditioned (behaviorism) to want criteria, so I set my own. Within the project I knew I needed rules and guidelines to keep it consistent and attractive and it turned out very well.
I'll stop ranting now. Those are my thoughts on behaviorism vs. cognitivism vs. constructivism.
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