Kelly A. Russell, PhD

I am a constructivist educator. My philosophy of teaching is grounded in the work of Jean Piaget. Piaget's work shows us that children are the creators of knowledge. Teachers are facilitators who put their students in situations that allow them to learn through interactions with peers and with the world. People learn in the interstitial space between "I understand" and "I do not understand". The state of being in this space is called disequilibrium. Because it is in disequilibrium that children construct knowledge, it is the job of the teacher to create dissonance in a child's thinking. 

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For Piaget, the aim of education is to help children to become autonomous individuals. He defined autonomy as the ability to consider all relevant factors and to determine what is true or untrue in the academic realm and what is right or wrong in the moral realm. Because autonomy is an ability, it is not something that can be given to children. Rather, it is a skill that must be modeled and practiced for children.