There’s a pretty big difference between explaining something and actually teaching it enough to stick as a “new concept”. Anyone who’s worked with students knows that distinction pretty quickly.
Constructivism gives us the core idea, drawn from Piaget’s work on cognitive development (1936), is that learners *don’t* absorb knowledge passively. They construct it, actively, by connecting new information to what they already understand with existing mental structures called “schemas”, which we as tutors actually work with, shape and contribute to every single day.
What does this mean/look like for us?
Firstly, it looks like slowing down at the start, so before introducing anything new, it’s worth asking a few questions. Not as a formality though, because the answers should genuinely change how you teach. A student carrying a misconception needs a very different conversation than one who simply hasn’t encountered the concept yet. Rosenshine’s “Principles of Instruction” (2012) put this into practice; his research consistently found that beginning a lesson by reviewing prior knowledge was actually one of the strongest predictors of whether new material would actually stick.
Second, this also means being deliberate about challenges – Vygotsky’s conceptualisation of the “Zone of Proximal Development” (1934) describes the gap between what a student can do independently and what they can do with support, and that gap is where good teaching lives and breathes. And, believe it or not, the instinct to over-explain and just keep adding words often works AGAINST this. What tends to help more is offering just enough scaffolding for a student to reach the next step themselves. The productive struggle actually matters (and, by the way, is one of the reasons why the seamlessness of AI is such a detriment to the educational psychology of learners the world over!) Cognitive load theory, tells us that overburdening working memory actually impedes learning – so the goal should be to reduce unnecessary complexity while preserving the thinking that builds understanding.
None of this is complicated in theory. In practice, it mostly requires knowledge, patience and a willingness to follow what the student knows and how they learn, instead of just a lesson plan, that’s what separates “teaching that covers the content” from “teaching that actually works”.

Mica Krzyzanowski