Introduction

One of the teacher’s most important roles in the construction of knowledge is to offer learners activities designed to develop the skills they are temporarily lacking. However, no definitive conclusions or value judgments should be hastily drawn from the findings of the learning moment. Let’s never say that a child doesn’t know something until his or her behaviors have been explored in all types of knowledge-building situations. To do this, teachers need to be familiar with a number of tasks that will enable them to help learners construct knowledge in a professional way.

Measures to encourage learning

To best help children build up their knowledge, the teacher needs to incorporate these learning-friendly tasks.

• Encouraging motivated encounters with obstacles

This encounter must be fostered in actual project or game situations, rather than waiting for the situation to occur on its own.

• Prompt and guide analysis of what happened during these situations 

It’s important to realize that analysis is not a spontaneous movement, and if no one is there to provoke and lead it, it won’t happen. That’s why it’s wrong to say that action is in itself learning.

• The teacher is a resource person

The teacher has something to contribute: the theories, the findings of researchers, the current conclusions of scientific research. In short, he has lessons to teach. But not at any time: that’s where the difference with traditional habits lies. 

• Facilitating the formulation of laws and rules

It’s the act of explicitly formulating, not mechanical memorization, that fixes knowledge. Saying what you’ve understood is the surest way to understand it definitively. 

• Leading internalization and training actions

Through these actions, children can add to their knowledge. It’s not enough to have understood, you also need to know how to integrate what you’ve understood. Without training, without exercises to internalize knowledge, it remains external, unavailable, fragile and quickly dispersed into oblivion.

• Observe children’s strategies and assess their acquisitions  

As for knowledge as such, it goes without saying that it’s built by the child, with the help of a teacher – admittedly indispensable. But it also involves his peers and his whole self, which is modified and enriched by this learning process.

Conclusion

Like any profession, teaching, more than any other field, requires the managers of the education system to continually reinforce their skills in order to best support children in the construction of knowledge. To do this, teachers need to be familiar with the theoretical tools of learning to best help their learners. These theories include, but are not limited to

• Stimulation,
• The humanist trend,
• The ethological movement,
• The behaviorist movement,
• The constructive current.

Translated from French into English by NECI BANTANGE Pacifique