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What is student-centered learning?
In the traditional approach to teaching, the students sit in rows watching the teacher give a lesson. Students are discouraged from talking or collaborating with each other. The teacher is an authority on the subject and dispenses the information that is worth learning, usually facts and procedures.
With student centered learning the focus is shifted from the teacher to the students. Student centered learning methods include active learning, cooperative learning, and inductive teaching and learning. The student is the most important component of the equation, on all levels.
Where did the approach evolve from?
Attending to the whole child: Progressive educators are concerned with helping children become not only good learners but also good people. Schooling isn’t seen as being about just academics, nor is intellectual growth limited to verbal and mathematical proficiencies.
Community: Children learn with and from one another in a caring community, and that’s true of moral as well as academic learning. Interdependence counts at least as much as independence, so it follows that practices that pit students against one another in some kind of competition, thereby undermining a feeling of community, are deliberately avoided.
Collaboration: In place of rewards for complying with the adults’ expectations, or punitive consequences for failing to do so, there’s more of an emphasis on collaborative problem-solving — and, for that matter, less focus on behaviors than on underlying motives, values, and reasons.
Social justice: A sense of community and responsibility for others isn’t confined to the classroom. Opportunities are offered not only to learn about, but also to put into action, a commitment to diversity and to improving the lives of others.
Intrinsic motivation: “What’s the effect on students’ interest in learning, their desire to continue reading, thinking, and questioning?” This deceptively simple test helps to determine what students will and won’t be asked to do. Thus, conventional practices, including homework, grades, and tests, prove difficult to justify for anyone who is serious about promoting long-term dispositions rather than just improving short-term skills.
Deep understanding: Facts and skills do matter, but only in a context and for a purpose. That’s why progressive education tends to be organized around problems, projects, and questions — rather than around lists of facts, skills, and separate disciplines. The teaching is typically interdisciplinary. Students are asked to think deeply about issues that matter and help them understand ideas from the inside out.
Active learning: The teacher guides the students through information in order to build knowledge. In progressive schools, students play a vital role in helping to design the curriculum, formulate the questions, seek out (and create) answers, think through possibilities, and evaluate how successful they — and their teachers — have been. Their active participation in every stage of the process is consistent with the overwhelming consensus of experts that learning is a matter of constructing ideas rather than passively absorbing information or practicing skills.
Taking kids seriously: In traditional schooling, as John Dewey once remarked, “the center of gravity is outside the child”. Progressive educators take their cue from the children — and are particularly attentive to differences among them. Progressive educators realize that the students must help to formulate not only the course of study but also the outcomes or standards that inform those lessons.
"Love of Learning" more than a sound-bite: Virtually every educator, parent, administrator, school board and ministry agrees on the principle, but it is not enough to merely say "love of learning" and "sense of community" in order for these thing to materialize. These values are given more than just lip-service in a student-centred school community since they are put into practice at the classroom, school and community level.
In the traditional approach to teaching, the students sit in rows watching the teacher give a lesson. Students are discouraged from talking or collaborating with each other. The teacher is an authority on the subject and dispenses the information that is worth learning, usually facts and procedures.
With student centered learning the focus is shifted from the teacher to the students. Student centered learning methods include active learning, cooperative learning, and inductive teaching and learning. The student is the most important component of the equation, on all levels.
- Active learning: students solve problems, answer questions, formulate questions of their own, discuss, explain, debate, or brainstorm during class
- Cooperative learning: students work in teams on problems and projects under conditions that assure both positive interdependence and individual accountability.
- Inductive learning: include inquiry-based learning, case-based instruction, problem-based learning, project-based learning, discovery learning, and just-in-time teaching.
Where did the approach evolve from?
- Student centered learning comes from the idea of progressive education: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a philosopher, began to advocate that educators "follow nature", wait for students' intellectual growth and for them to demonstrate interest in a subject. Rousseau's ideas did not gain common currency, however, until they were adopted by the American social scientist John Dewey around the turn of this century. Dewey's recommendations, such as his emphasis on "learning by doing" and his belief that the process is more important than the product.
- Progressive education gained a lot attention in North America thanks to John Dewy.
- Progressive education attends to the whole child and schools can be characterized according to how closely they reflect a commitment to the following values:
Attending to the whole child: Progressive educators are concerned with helping children become not only good learners but also good people. Schooling isn’t seen as being about just academics, nor is intellectual growth limited to verbal and mathematical proficiencies.
Community: Children learn with and from one another in a caring community, and that’s true of moral as well as academic learning. Interdependence counts at least as much as independence, so it follows that practices that pit students against one another in some kind of competition, thereby undermining a feeling of community, are deliberately avoided.
Collaboration: In place of rewards for complying with the adults’ expectations, or punitive consequences for failing to do so, there’s more of an emphasis on collaborative problem-solving — and, for that matter, less focus on behaviors than on underlying motives, values, and reasons.
Social justice: A sense of community and responsibility for others isn’t confined to the classroom. Opportunities are offered not only to learn about, but also to put into action, a commitment to diversity and to improving the lives of others.
Intrinsic motivation: “What’s the effect on students’ interest in learning, their desire to continue reading, thinking, and questioning?” This deceptively simple test helps to determine what students will and won’t be asked to do. Thus, conventional practices, including homework, grades, and tests, prove difficult to justify for anyone who is serious about promoting long-term dispositions rather than just improving short-term skills.
Deep understanding: Facts and skills do matter, but only in a context and for a purpose. That’s why progressive education tends to be organized around problems, projects, and questions — rather than around lists of facts, skills, and separate disciplines. The teaching is typically interdisciplinary. Students are asked to think deeply about issues that matter and help them understand ideas from the inside out.
Active learning: The teacher guides the students through information in order to build knowledge. In progressive schools, students play a vital role in helping to design the curriculum, formulate the questions, seek out (and create) answers, think through possibilities, and evaluate how successful they — and their teachers — have been. Their active participation in every stage of the process is consistent with the overwhelming consensus of experts that learning is a matter of constructing ideas rather than passively absorbing information or practicing skills.
Taking kids seriously: In traditional schooling, as John Dewey once remarked, “the center of gravity is outside the child”. Progressive educators take their cue from the children — and are particularly attentive to differences among them. Progressive educators realize that the students must help to formulate not only the course of study but also the outcomes or standards that inform those lessons.
"Love of Learning" more than a sound-bite: Virtually every educator, parent, administrator, school board and ministry agrees on the principle, but it is not enough to merely say "love of learning" and "sense of community" in order for these thing to materialize. These values are given more than just lip-service in a student-centred school community since they are put into practice at the classroom, school and community level.