Effective 'Constructivist' Teachers....

1. Create student-centered classrooms.

2. Create an environment in which students feel comfortable saying what they think.

3. Treat students with respect regardless of race, color, gender, culture or other considerations.

4. Respect student ideas and treat them with care.

5. Give students time to think through and generate their own questions, hypotheses, experiments, and solutions.

6. Become facilitators of students' learning rather than control agents or fonts of knowledge.

7. Become learning partners with the students.

8. Identify and prepare challenging, appropriate topics of study for the students.

9. Guide students through the discovery process.

10. Speak softly in the classroom, with gentleness and politeness.

11. Frequently get down to the students' level (physically) to enter into discourse with them.

12. Create an environment that encourages students to talk with students about science.

13. Create an environment that encourages and respects sense-making.

14. Link science learning to every day life on a regular basis.

15. Often integrate learning of other subjects (language arts, mathematics, social studies, etc.) with science learning.

16. Employ wait time after questions.

17. Encourage student ownership of ideas.

18. Encourage students to take responsibility for their own learning.

19. Are good listeners.