Carol A. Gordon, Ed.D.

Carol Gordon is a constructivist teacher who focuses on learning. She believes that learners construct meaning as they activate prior knowledge and build on it. The teacher is a facilitator in search of what works. She espouses John Dewey’s theory of learning as action and reflection and his love of learning for the sake of learning: “Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself.” She sees learning as discovery and the library media center as the best equipped classroom in school where learning can happen through the interaction of learners and ideas. She agrees with Jerome Bruner’s observation that, “The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion-these are the most valuable coins of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness.”   There is a thin line between learning and playing that she sees this as a line in the sand that technology can sweep away. Her philosophy of teaching and learning is morphing toward the constructionism of Papert, who saw the computer as the “children’s machine” that could give “ ...And Constructionism means "Giving children good things to do so that they can learn by doing much better than they could before."