Teachers’ Perspectives on Constructivist Teaching Strategies that Enhance Student Engagement in Preschool Settings.

Proceedings of the 2nd International Academic Conference on Humanities and Social Science

Year: 2019

DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.33422/2iachss.2019.02.25

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Teachers’ Perspectives on Constructivist Teaching Strategies that Enhance Student Engagement in Preschool Settings.

Maria Sakellariou and Efthymia Tsiara

 

ABSTRACT: 

This paper explores student engagement which is considered to be one of the biggest challenges facing the research community and the contemporary teacher. Research on student engagement describes strengths and limitations of various constructivist strategies that foster student engagement. Frustration occurs, however, if teachers use a systematic approach to enhance current student engagement. Through one to one, semi-structured interviews, we investigate 80 Greek teachers’ perspectives on engaging strategies applied during regular class instruction in preschool settings. The interviews are developed based on Creswell’s (2008) interview model, with a mixture of open-ended and close-ended questions. Based on qualitative and quantitative data analysis, we present that Greek teachers, in an attempt to involve preschoolers in learning, use a range of constructivist general strategies (i.e. cooperative learning; guided instruction; problem-based learning etc.) and micro-strategies (i.e. using gestures, questioning and response micro-strategies). Expectedly the participants identify that constructivist strategies are of the utmost importance, but they use each one at a different frequency.

Key words: constructivist general strategies and micro – strategies; qualitative and quantitative data analysis; frequency; semi-structured interviews; student engagement.