Constructivist Learning Theory: “Learning by Relevance”

I find the theory of constructivist theory very interesting and timely since it helps me explain my teaching method.  Most of my life I am practitioner of business. I have no formal educational training. What I do know is that for students to absorb and understand anything they have to relate it to their personal experience that is why I do a major adjustment when I teach business concepts to college students. The challenge of teaching business in college is simple-how to make business relevant to students who actually don’t make a living? Who don’t feel the necessity to pay their bills?

 I must admit when I was younger, I deplore any subjects with mathematics or accounting. I feel like I’m suffering from mathematical form of dyslexia, until I started running a company. Suddenly, what I would normally deplore learning suddenly became an effortless absorption. Never in a million years, did I imagine myself teaching Financial Management but it actually happened.

It made me realize when I was younger; I did not see Mathematics as a necessity until I started running a firm and we tried to monitor our financials on a regular basis.  When I started teaching in the academe, I made it a point to make college students of business understand the necessity to read and analyze financials. How crucial and dangerous it is to be illiterate in financial management.  I relate it to their personal experiences. I asked them to make their own personal financial statement. How much their lifestyle cost, how much they need to earn and I show them the actually how much employers are willing to pay them based on their life skills. This would make them understand how lucky and privileged they are and why as students of entrepreneurship, they should set up and run their own firms as early as possible to afford their lifestyle. Because for me, the primary reason why students don’t feel the motivation to start their own firms it’s because presently they are not breadwinners.  They have parents who can provide for them. But I explained to my students, that the best age to start a firm is in your 20s since they are still single and they can still run to their parents for help. Once they reach their 30s they usually have their own families and their parents’ starts getting sick or dying. (Retirement savings for the elderly is only for a small portion of the population of the Philippines).

The more the entrepreneurship graduate delays their venture, the more their risk taking tolerance lowers as they age. This is due to the fact as student’s age they are starting their own families and need stability, or their parents are already retired and need care. This would drastically affect a potential entrepreneurs risk taking activity in the long run.  Unless Philippine society makes retirement savings an imperative to all entrepreneurs and employees the cycle of dependent parents will not change.

In summary, I agree with the Constructivist learning theory that it is very essential that learners be able to relate the lesson to their experience, because unless they can relate it to their experience, they won’t remember it in the long run.  In fact the best processing of experience is through a feeling of “necessity”. The best lessons are those lessons that really taught us a hard lesson that impacted us on a personal level.