What is Constructivism?

You may have never heard the word "constructivism," but I bet you've heard plenty about play-based or hands-on learning. Those ideas didn't come out of nowhere. Almost every approach to early childhood education you hear about these days, from play-based preschools to the Reggio approach and Montessori philosophy, is rooted in constructivist theory.

What is Constructivism? 

Constructivists believe that people build (construct) their own understanding of the world through direct experience and reflection. Knowledge isn't something an adult can pour into a child's head. Kids are active builders of understanding, not empty vessels waiting to be filled.

If you want to get a little theoretical, there are three big names behind this idea. 

1. Jean Piaget believed children construct knowledge step by step as they grow, almost like scientists running experiments.
2. Lev Vygotsky added that this building is social: kids learn by working things out with other people, and they can reach further with a little support from an adult or an older child.
3. Jerome Bruner believed kids learn best by discovering things for themselves, moving from doing, to representing, to understanding the abstract idea.

So how can you tell if an approach to learning is constructivist?

There are a few really clear markers:

• Kids learn through hands-on experience and problem solving

• Understanding matters more than memorization

• Children have real choice and independence in their learning

• Learning happens in relationship with others

• Adults set up the environment and support, rather than lecture

Once you know what to look for, you'll start seeing constructivism everywhere, including in things you're probably already doing at home or seeing happen in your child’s classroom.

Learning through play is constructivist

Play-based learning is all over the internet these days, and for good reason: kids learn best through hands-on, playful experiences. Something that looks silly to an outside observer might be the most important thing a child does all day. I love to use block play as an example. Through play with blocks, kids often find, and then solve, some of the very first problems they experience. They have an idea in their head and have to figure out how to make it real.

Unit blocks (my personal favorite toy) were designed by Caroline Pratt, a progressive educator who opened one of the first play-centered schools in New York City in 1914. She believed children learn by building their own versions of the world around them, so she gave them wooden blocks along with some basic art supplies and plenty of time to use them.

Kids play to make sense of the world. When they're becoming a big sibling for the first time, they play games about babies. When they start preschool, they build little classrooms in their playroom. When they visit a big city, they come home and build skyscrapers. Play is also an incredible tool for social emotional learning. Kids act out family life, a favorite book or movie, or a dream they had, often together with friends. They pretend to be someone they're not so they can better understand what's going on around them.

As adults in a play-based environment, our job is to provide space, time, and materials for play. The child is in charge of the learning, and unstructured play time is what gives their ideas room to grow.

Open-ended toys are constructivist

Open-ended toys are having a moment. They’re playthings that don't have one “right way” to use them. Blocks and other building materials, loose parts, and play cloths are all examples. A popular saying is that the less a toy does, the more the child's brain gets to do. It’s true! There's a time and place for single-purpose toys like puzzles and games, but open-ended toys offer kids the most hands-on, big-thinking play.

Open-ended toys are a great constructivist tool because the ways to play with them are endless. One day loose parts are gems in a treasure hunt, the next they're meatballs at a pretend restaurant, and after that they're decorations on a huge block tower. When a toy isn't already something specific, kids get to decide what it is. They come up with the play and use their materials in whatever way makes sense to them that day. These toys also grow with the child, so the same set supports hands-on learning across a huge range of ages.

Sensory play is constructivist

Young children experience the world through all of their senses from the very beginning, so sensory play meets them right where they are. And what's more hands-on than learning with your hands, feet, nose, and ears?

Children build their understanding of the world through physical experience. If you want to get a little theoretical, psychologist Jean Piaget called the period from birth to about age two the sensorimotor stage. In this stage, babies and toddlers learn by combining what they sense with how they move: grabbing, mouthing, dropping, squeezing, pouring. They haven't built up many ideas in their heads yet, so they repeat these experiences over and over, and that repetition is how the understanding forms. Adults can support this by adding language, simply describing what the child is doing and feeling as they play.

With sensory play, the experience itself is the goal. There's no finished product to show for it, and that's the point. Constructivism says kids learn by experiencing the world with their whole bodies, and sensory play gives them exactly that.

The Reggio Emilia approach is constructivist

The Reggio Emilia approach started in a town of the same name in northern Italy, where families came together after World War II to build schools for their children, with educator Loris Malaguzzi helping shape them. The approach sees the child as a whole person: curious, capable, and full of ideas. It also recognizes the "hundred languages" of children, meaning all the different ways kids communicate and make sense of the world, like drawing, building, clay, movement, music, and speech.

In a Reggio setting, teachers are both observers and co-researchers alongside the children. They set up spaces that spark curiosity, then watch and listen closely to the children's questions. Those questions become the starting point for projects, and teachers keep adjusting and reimagining the space to keep that curiosity going. The environment is considered the "third teacher," which is why so much care goes into the space and materials.

Reggio is constructivist because it's rooted in learning through experience. It also reflects social constructivism, the idea that people build understanding together. Children share ideas, build on each other's thinking, disagree, revise what they think, and do it all again.

Montessori is constructivist

Montessori might be the most structured philosophy on this list, and at first it might seem out of place. It isn't. If you look closely at what children are actually doing in a Montessori classroom, you'll see why it's constructivist too.

Maria Montessori was a doctor before she was an educator, and she studied children the way a scientist would: by watching them closely. Her first school opened in Rome in 1907, and everything in a Montessori classroom today grew out of what she observed there. The materials she developed for her schools were all designed for hands-on learning. She understood that children need to learn through many senses at once, and she built a method that made those materials available while also supporting choice and independence from a very young age.

Montessori materials are very different from what you'd see in a Reggio or play-based classroom. Most have one specific purpose, a lot like the single-purpose toys I mentioned earlier. But they're still constructivist, because they turn abstract ideas into something kids can touch. Golden beads, for example, let children see and feel place value: a single bead, a bar of ten, a square of a hundred, and a cube of a thousand, each one noticeably bigger and heavier than the last. The pink tower, a set of ten cubes that grow in size, lets children feel size and scale with their hands and eyes as they stack it.

Most Montessori work is also self-correcting, meaning the material itself shows the child whether they've got it right. If a piece doesn't fit, the child can see it and try again without an adult stepping in. That gives kids a lot of independence. They choose their work, go at their own pace, and get a clear sense of what they can do. Montessori is constructivist through and through.

So why does Constructivism matter?

Constructivism isn't new or experimental. It's not a curriculum someone made up in hopes that it would work. It's a theory of learning based on careful observation of how children actually learn. The thinkers I mentioned here didn't invent something. They wrote down what they saw. They recorded how children make sense of the world and shared it so we could better support children and their incredible ability to build knowledge. Educators like Caroline Pratt, Maria Montessori, and Loris Malaguzzi were watching children the same way, and they built what they saw into their schools.

But it's not just children who learn this way. It's all of us. Think about the last time you learned something new. You probably understood it best once you tried it yourself.

So choosing a constructivist approach for your child shouldn't feel risky. It's simply how children learn best. All we have to do as adults is notice it and support it by giving kids the time, space, and materials they need to build their own understanding.