What Does Student-Centered Teaching Mean to You?
In discussions with other teachers I’ve found that everyone has a different idea of what student-centered teaching looks like to them. For some teachers it’s having students work on long-term projects together. For other teachers student-centered teaching involves students teaching lessons in class.
For me student-centered teaching has to do with democracy and constructive realism.
1. Democracy. Democracy in the classroom needs to be carefully tread. You have to know your students and know how to deal with their requests if this is going to be carried out correctly. Allowing students a voice in constructing knowledge does not mean that we throw out the curriculum and the standards that we have to meet as instructors. There is nothing wrong with sharing the curriculum and teaching standards with the students. Students will get it. Once they understand constructing knowledge based on learning standards students can then make an informed decision about what they want to learn.
For example if one of the writing standards for 8th grade Language Arts is that students be able to write a technical writing piece then let them choose the subject. They can write about how to choose the perfect cell phone for your needs. They can write about how to cook their favorite dessert. They can write about how to play cooperatively on the New Super Mario Bros game for the Wii.
When students take ownership of the class they perform better. If they’re uninvolved and feel left out or left behind the subject matter will not inspire their best performance and passion.
2. Constructive Realism. I’m not using this term in a philosophical sense, but in the sense of constructing real knowledge in the classroom. For the 21st century classroom this means employing educational technology whenever possible while still keeping a student-centered focus. There is a time and a place for lecturing and modeling from the teacher. Then hand over the knowledge construction to the students. Give them a chance to show off. Let them build a community on Facebook or collaborate with other schools on a wiki page, collaborate with global students on a piece of music they’ve created, practice their French with students in France or Haiti etc. Give students a chance to construct real and practical knowledge that they feel is important on Web 2.0 and you will be surprised at what they come up with. There’s a project to construct for every student and every subject.
- In what way is your class a democratic classroom?
- How do you use educational technology constructively?
Related posts:
[...] created their projects displaying the differences between mass and weight. It was an example of student-centered teaching at its best. I was proud of them. I was proud of [...]