This morning, Heather recalled how a professor’s inclusive in-class grammar made learning more engaging. In this post, I want to think about how we frame our pedagogy, to ourselves and to our colleagues. In September of 2009, I wrote an article for ProfHacker about Teacher-Centered vs. Student-Centered pedagogy. In that post, I described a situation I’d found myself in where I had been described by a new colleague as a “teacher-centered” instructor.
I understood very quickly that my colleague and I were not working with the same definition of the term, as I’d always seen myself (and others had seen me) as a student-centered instructor.
In my real life and in the comments to that ProfHacker post, the term “teacher-centered” stirred some debate. As modern-day pedagogues, we desire to be student-centered, egalitarian, libratory, process-centered, or whatever modern-day buzz-word we can include to produce hip and wonderful descriptions of our teaching styles. Being “teacher-centered” in the midst of those other idealistic terms, can be, well, offensive … at least to a teacher of writing who is supposed to be–by nature of the discipline and her personality–student centered.
Teacher-Centered Pedagogy
Generally, teacher-centered pedagogy is, simply put, a system in which most of the meaningful course information comes from the instructor. This approach places a significant amount of responsibility on the instructor to provide the “right” information, in the “right” way, regardless of learning/teaching styles. Depending on many factors (discipline, for example), teacher-centered pedagogy is the preferred method of content dissemination for both teachers and students. However, this style of teaching can be limiting to students. Most of us know what to expect in this educational environment, and the roles of teacher/students are well-defined. This style of teaching/learning is traditional.
Student-Centered Pedagogy
The roles of student and teacher in a student-centered pedagogy, on the other hand, can be less clear and predicable. Often in student-centered pedagogy, students take on more responsibility for their learning, as they have to do some of the work of teaching. In a student-centered classroom, as just one example, students create knowledge by working with each other, with their instructor, with outside community agencies to apply course content in a “real world” type of manner. Again, depending on the discipline, student-centered teaching approaches can be very effective for students, but this type of environment can be chaotic for some students who desire highly structured learning environments.
O’Neill and McMahon placed this debate on a continuum:
But even this continuum lends to an all-or-nothing understanding, as there doesn’t seem to be much room in the middle for alternate styles and methods.
Reframing the Debate
However, perhaps we need to redefine the center of this pedagogical debate as not being person-centered at all. Perhaps we remove the actors and focus on the action. If we can reframe the debate, looking at this issue from a number of perspectives, pedagogy can then become “learning centered.” McCombs and Miller in Learner-Centered Classroom Practices and Assessments explain that learning centered environments “balance the concern with learning and achievement and concern with diverse learner needs.” Additionally, learning-centered pedagogy “meaningfully predicts learner motivation and levels of learning and achievement” (120).
How about you?
ProfHacker readers come from all disciplines, from all ranks, and from all types of learning/teaching strengths. How do you balance pedagogical methods in your class/discipline? How do you implement a “learning-centered” focus into your classes? In other words, please share the strategies for creating a LEARNING focused classroom. Please leave comments below.
Creative Commons image by Billie Hara.
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10 Responses to Learning-Centered Pedagogy
peril - June 24, 2010 at 2:27 pm
This seems to me like an bit of a frivolous argument. Playing word games to rebuild the definitions of roles doesn’t really change the actions of a passive vs. active student/teacher/conversational environment. It just makes dictatorial teachers feel more personable, and overly interpersonal teachers feel more traditionally professional…I’ll follow the jump later and read the Learner-Centered Classroom Practices as I don’t recall the article at all (if I even read it to begin with). But purely addressing this article, I’m not sure it’s helpful beyond giving educators another (albeit ever-necessary) chance to evaluate how we are presenting ourselves.
eileenqueen - June 24, 2010 at 3:55 pm
Do we all teach all of our classes with one approach? I suspect others like me de-center their role in dealing with upper-division students who can and should be framing questions, working out group dynamics, and building some unique variant of knowledge based on what I provide. In my lower-division classes, though, I give my nervous students more guidance. They might never have seen a formal academic essay before; they might still call me “Mrs” rather than “Dr” or “Professor” because they are still thinking of learning as what they did in high school. Sometimes if a class is not too large I have been able to take freshman into a constructivist classroom, but everybody is stressed out these days (here in California, for sure) and I try to lessen that for them.
iteachpsych - June 24, 2010 at 7:18 pm
There are times I use methods that may be perceived as teacher-centered; there are times I use methods that may be perceived as student-centered. It depends on the class, the topic, the students at hand, the resources I plan to use, etc. and seems to balance out into what I would deem a learning-centered approach. In my opinion, “teacher-centered,” “student-centered,” “student learning outcomes,” and other education-related trendy words are bandied around so much that they have ceased to be much other than “fightin’ words” to sling back and forth.
billiehara - June 24, 2010 at 8:15 pm
Thanks for the comments, folks. I tend to think that posts like this one are not “frivolous arguments.” But then I wrote this post. I’m biased.@iteachpsych I agree about the terms being “fightin’ words.” They do tend to bring out emotions. I wrote this post in response to conversations I’ve had the past few weeks with students in two classes I’m teaching this summer. One of these classes is populated with preservice teachers (mostly early childhood education) and the other is a graduate course is basic writing theory/pedagogy. Almost all these students– about 40 in all– have spoken at length about what kind of teachers they hope to be one day . . . and they compare the images of who they wish to become against the teachers they have had.It’s not a pretty picture.Most educators (we’d like to hope) vary their teaching styles to address the students at hand, the students’ needs, the topic of the course or that day, etc. These 40 students are learning about the importance of using multiple pedagogical styles in a classroom, but that is not what they see in their own classes with their own professors. Many of these 40 students perceive their professors as “my way or the highway” kind of individuals because their professors are NOT aware (or don’t care to be aware) that there are other ways to teach, ways that are are NOT teacher centered.So, I write this post. Many of us don’t need to be reminded about students’ needs, their different learning styles needed to reach them. But some of us do.
derekbruff - June 24, 2010 at 9:23 pm
@iteachpsych I get what you’re saying about these terms being “fightin’ words,” but I think it’s a real loss if college instructors reject the use of educational terminology to describe the teaching that they do or avoid discussions of such terms. Discussing serious intellectual work–whether that’s disciplinary research or scholarship or the teaching that we do–requires the use of meaningful terminology. This isn’t about using “trendy” terms; it’s about developing a common language so we can have useful conversations about teaching. Without some attention to the terminology we use, we run the risk of treating teaching as something less than serious intellectual work.To that end, the McCombs and Miller definition of learner-centeredness mentioned above seems consistent with the definition used in How People Learn (HPL), a summary of decades of cognitive science research and a frequently cited book on this topic. I tend to defer to HPL on these things given its widespread use in the field.
behzodsirjani - June 25, 2010 at 12:09 am
I’m with derekbruff on this (and I guess Billie Hara as well) in that “learning-centered pedagogy” should be just that – pedagogical tools that focus on student engagement and learning, not force-feeding or a lack of any instruction at all. While I am only a student, I have tutored and instructed in a number of contexts, from one-on-one writing instruction at levels from K-Undergraduate to high school workshops for students in alternative schools. Like it has been mentioned in this debate, a pedagogical approach that focuses on student learning is one that will account for “diverse learner needs.” Every student and every situation is different, and it is the job of the instructor to balance the tools of instruction in order to try and engage the students as they need. I am sure, as peril pointed out, this could appear to be mere rhetoric on an educator’s behalf, but it also, as the author pointed out, can serve as a refresher to some who may forget that there is not just one right way to teach. Rather teaching, in its very essence, requires one to adapt, evolve, and accommodate in order to share our love for a subject (as well as for learning.) I do not think I needed to be told that learning-centered pedagogy must account for various needs of students, but that does not mean this article was not beneficial for me to think about. :)
cleverclogs - June 25, 2010 at 8:41 am
Hm – the McCombs-Miller books cited is about learner-centered, not learning-centered classrooms. I haven’t read it, but the title and those few quotes do not suggest, as the article does, the idea that we might “remove the actors and focus on the action.” A “learner” is still an actor. So I’m not sure what the author intended there.Recently, I’ve stopped asking myself whether or not my assignments are hitting all learning styles because in a classroom of even just 35 people, there’s too much diversity to cover it all well. Instead, I’ve started asking myself, what is the best way to teach this particular material? Sometimes that means lecturing, sometimes it means letting students research and present, sometimes it means watching films, sometimes it means getting up and doing an activity. I enjoy the variety myself, and I have pretty high attendance and good particiaption, so I feel good that it’s working for the students too. A perhaps odd side-benefit: I’ve stopped thinking of the students as just learners or students and have begun to think of them more as people with real lives. This somehow allows me to be less invested in manipulating their experience in the classroom and they feel less like they have to worry about disappointing me if they don’t do well on a test. Instead it’s about something more objective – the material – which can be nice if everything else in your life feels so deeply personal.
gabrielledean - June 25, 2010 at 10:44 am
@cleverclogs: I agree; a focus on the material can be productive for a lot of students. (Not all, but that gets back to the variety issue.) And it explains why so many students still enjoy (and expect) the “sage on the stage” model that teachers are now supposed to eschew. The basic premise of the “sage” is that she/he loves the material and knows a lot about it, and some students find that passion compelling and contagious. I’m not advocating a return to exclusive “saginess”; it’s limited in all kinds of ways. But if the ability to talk engagingly about the material at hand is one of the techniques you can bring to a classroom, why not? Focusing on the material also facilitates one of those developmental pieces of higher education: it helps people learn to care about something that is not personal, as cleverclogs notes, and thus offers them another domain of experience.I recently started using the term “learning-centered teaching” to describe what I do, or aspire to do–not realizing it was already gaining traction as genuine jargon! For me it felt like a necessary correction to the dilemmas posed by the “student-centered” emphasis–an emphasis I agreed with in theory, but which I found created all kinds of difficulties in actual classroom practice. Ironically, it was the students who were less “prepared,” as we say, for college–the ones who were theoretically supposed to benefit from a recentering on their experience–who were put at a disadvantage. Why? Because they exploited the freedom and choice in my classroom. And I think it was also confusing in terms of the boundaries of authority: there were lots of choices and activities in some arenas, but then I was still the ultimate authority in others. When you put the emphasis on the learning, then you are still asking students to play an active role in their own education–they still have to learn how they learn–but it is also easier to assert your authority consistently.”Teacher-centered” is, of course, a back-formation of “student-centered”–an easy target, a way to descrbe what we don’t do anymore. (Did teachers used to think what they did was teacher-centered? Probably not.) But I wouldn’t mind revisiting that term as well. In the Venn diagram of the classroom (real and virtual) there are students, there is material, there is an environment, there are activities–and there is a teacher. The learning encompasses all of those spheres, and at different moments, should probably be focused on different intersections.
dboyles - June 25, 2010 at 3:11 pm
For many years in organic chemistry and biochemistry I have used a method I consider neither teacher-centered nor learner- centered. In fact, I make it clear to my students that my courses are neither about me nor them, but about the material. Hence, my course is text-centered, and I offer it to you for consideration as a possible “third” way.After years of lecturing I gradually became very disillusioned to find that students were putting onto myself the responsibility to “tell them everything we are to know” and, in so defaulting to lecture, were themselves failing to do their part out of class. (“We love your lectures but can’t do well on the exams”–uh huh, and don’t we all know why?.) In fact, I came to see (via a variety of venues over the years about 10 years into my university career, including discussions with Karl Smith, attendance at various faculty development seminars, etc) that lecture was a default for both (1) the professor, and (2) the student. It is far easier for me to lecture without notes on subjects I know like the back of my hand than it is for me to prepare daily quizzes over reading material, monitor learning on a daily basis, and enter grades daily in a fairly large enrollment class. Likewise, it is far easier for students to come to class (if they do) and be expected to know nothing but merely watch the teacher and deceive themselves that they will remember everything said (few take notes theseadays). Ideally they would have first read the assigned material before coming to class and we would have an lively discussion of it leading to their collective enlightenment, but alas, that is rarely the case other than with the very best and most self-disciplined of students.Instead of lecture, I give daily reading assignments from the text–approximately 13 pages long, long enough to cover the required syllabus coverage represented by the text which will thus end up covered at the end of the two-course sequence. Granted, chemistry is content-oriented, and the content has primacy in chemistry; I do not claim my method as universal for non-content classes–although the accountability element is crucial. However, as a student in college many years ago, I hasten to say that I do recall the enormous time spent in English Literature reading Beowulf, Henry Fielding, Virginia Woolf, Keats, Shelley and other writers and we covered entire novels. (I owe many humanities teachers a debt of thanks in this regard). My students–chemistry and engineering students–by comparison would rather be told what to know than work with the material, hence, I–frankly–structure the method to thwart that expectation. Daily, the students spend 5 minutes in their preassigned (and random) group debriefing on what they individually read; of course they can’t know the reading entirely, but it is rather naive to think one can. They then take an individual quiz on the reading/text problems material and pass in the quiz after 20 minutes. They get back in their group (4-5 students) and take the IDENTICAL quiz together. Of course, this is the forgiveness in the method–their group quizzes usually receive 9 our of 10 points. I collect the group quiz after 15 minutes. Students pick up the individual quiz of another student, I put up an overhead with the answers and go through it as students grade their classmate’s paper. In this latter they end up at the end of the class period knowing the answers to each question. I enter in my gradebook their individual and group scores. Their grade on a quiz is the average of the two. Repeat each class period.The 3 to 4 exams in the courses are entirely individual with no group component, and one exam is worth the point value of ten quizzes.I arrived at this method after various attempts at so-called cooperative learning strategies, but ultimately realized that various fun and games during class however lively really didn’t lead to content knowledge unless there were stakes associated with them, namely, points which rewarded actually KNOWING the material. Of course, student reading comprehension soars over the course of two semesters with such a method. Additionally, students learn that they must MAKE MEANING out of what they read. Many of them seem have never done this in a class before–or never to have been so expected by their professors if I may be frank. Likewise, students realize that they must adjust to knowledge uncertainties (they exist even in textbooks as well as in the ‘real’ world of science) and that the student simply can’t know everything all at once; leaning takes time and continuous attempts at meaning-making. The time a student spends on the assignment is up to him/her, but the guideline is entirely traditional: 2 hours out of class as rule of thumb (which–honestly, is what they should be doing anyway but simply won’t unless they literally have no choice but to do so). If learning anxieties drive them to do more, fine, but is it really worth it for a 10 point quiz? They learn to budget their time and spend quality time rather than quantity time studying.Granted, I am no longer the talking head in front of the class. And I am not going to get a teaching award at an engineering school where lecture is the traditional mode of course delivery, emphasis on engaged learning methods notwithstanding. This is an ego-decentered method in its truest sense. I really miss being the know-it-all students approach as the fount of knowledge. Most students have now heard of my method and take to it just fine. When I first began, however, comment were legion that “we pay you to lecture.” That kind of comment was telling and is best taken as signifying “hold us accountable for no more than what you yourself can tell us in 50 minutes” and not for anything we are to study outside the class period. It is gratifying, on the other hand, to see reading comprehension soar, and to see students actually making meaning out of textual material which is part and parcel of content-oriented science knowledge. It is gratifying to walk into class and hear students actually speaking the polysyllabic terms and material to one another (as opposed to lecture where students can go two semesters and never even speak chemistry terminology–which is highly technical and verbalization of which absolutely facilitates learning but unless there is incentive to do so, won’t occur. I realize that not every discipline has the luxury of texts in the 9th+ edition with accompanying solution manuals of solved problems for every in-text and end-of-chapter problem. But chemistry does, and the publishing market is highly competitive hence produces ideal materials suited to this method (which is not, by the way, original with me but was published several years ago by Dr. Frank Dinan of Canisius College in the Journal of Chemical Education). It is very surprising more faculty in the sciences to not use this method in this era of ‘collaborative’ learning, etc. I don’t put it in that category, however, but call it text-based learning. When the text becomes a dirty word–and it frequently is among engineering students, or so it seems, so does knowledge, so do great novels. Higher education’s move away from the text and accountability to the writen and spoken word of knowledge, and increasingly toward the image (can you say PowerPoint, YouTube, etc…) does neither knowledge nor the student any service. And, IMHO, neither does representing learning as occuring between two parties, without the triangulation by the knowledge corpus itself which is the elephant in the room that a two-party approach to learning tends to forget is the point of the university–at least in language acquisition in the undergraduate curriculum of chemistry which is critical as it is foundational.
derekbruff - June 29, 2010 at 10:23 am
Thanks, @dboyles, for sharing your approach to teaching chemistry here. It’s a great approach, and I’m glad to hear it’s worked so well for you.Since I’m a fan of using appropriate jargon (see my comment above), I’ll note that @dboyles’ approach is a modification of Team-Based Learning (TBL), an approach championed by Larry Michaelsen, among others. I looked up the article by Frank Dinan that @dboyles cites, and Dinan cites Michaelsen, too, which explains the TBL elements in what @dboyles describes. There’s a lot of literature on TBL, as well as an annual conference and a listserv, so anyone interested in @dboyles’ approach is encouraged to check out the TBL website.Also, the idea of “text-based pedagogy” would probably be considered an example of knowledge-centered teaching by the How People Learn authors. They note that effective learning environments are ones that are knowledge-centered, learner-centered, assessment-centered, and community-centered. The TBL approach that @dboyles describes hits all four of these elements very well! There’s an emphasis on scaffolding students’ knowledge through careful selection of readings (knowledge-centered), an emphasis on helping students uncover and resolve their misconceptions (learner-centered), an emphasis on providing frequent feedback on students’ learning (assessment-centered), and an emphasis on leveraging the community of learners present in the classroom (community-centered).In short, what @dboyles has outlined is an approach to teaching well-supported by the literature on teaching and learning in higher ed!