If you have been teaching for any length of time, you have probably heard the phrases “student-centered” pedagogy or “teacher-centered” pedagogy. The use of these strategies (positively or negatively) can affect student learning, teaching evaluations, or even tenure and promotion decisions.
Last week, I had my first peer-to-peer teacher observation as a new assistant professor. After teaching at the college level for 10 years, I felt my teaching and pedagogy were sound, so I wasn’t too concerned about being observed by a colleague. In a debriefing after the observed session, my colleague noted that the class seemed to be “teacher-centered.” This was not offered as a critique, but simply as a statement. The statement, however, surprised me. I had always seen myself as a “student-centered” type of teacher. Since I teach composition, which is typically a student-centered discipline, I was confused. I wondered if we’d been in the same classroom and witnessed the same interactions or if we were using the same definitions of those often-used terms.
Maryellen Weimer offers good definitions of the two terms in her book Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice. She notes that in student-centered teaching, student learning is the focus of the class. On the other hand, in teacher-centered approaches, teaching practices are the focus of the session. Since I was teaching a course to pre-service (early childhood and secondary education) teachers, this might have resulted in a teacher-centered pedagogy.
Weimer explains that in order to be learner-centered, instructional practice needs to change in five key areas: the balance of power, the function of content, the role of the teacher, the responsibility for learning, and the purpose and processes of evaluation. In this, however, she assumes that student-centered pedagogy is the most appropriate. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. Many variables come into play when we try to determine which teaching style is “best”:
- discipline
- class size
- subject within the discipline
- room layout
- environmental factors in the room (temperature, for example)
- teacher personality
- classroom dynamic (between students)
Teaching strategies can become a complicated issue, and teaching effectiveness can affect student learning, teaching evaluations, or even tenure and promotion decisions. Many university campuses have teaching centers, sometimes called Teaching and Learning Centers, Centers for Teaching Excellence, Faculty Renaissance Centers (as it’s called on my campus). These are resources to learn about and understand what type of pedagogy might be appropriate for your classes or your discipline. On-line resources are also available. POD (Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education) is an organization devoted specifically to teaching and learning in higher education. (The listserv is a wonderful resource of information.)
Over the next several weeks, ProfHacker will devote columns to the practice of teaching and learning. If you have questions or concerns about this issue, please leave those in comments below. If you have resources that you’d like to share, please leave those comments as well.
Follow Profhacker through your favorite RSS reader: 
17 Responses to Teacher-Centered vs. Student-Centered Pedagogy
George H. Williams - September 18, 2009 at 2:14 pm
Sherman, I’m afraid I don’t understand your comment. Billie summarizes Maryellen Weimer as follows “in student-centered teaching, student learning is the focus of the class. On the other hand, in teacher-centered approaches, teaching practices are the focus…”
I understand this to mean that one approach would be to evaluate the effectiveness of teaching by what the students are learning, and one would be to evaluate the effectiveness of teaching by what teaching practices are being used.
Is this not what your understanding is?
Sherman Dorn - September 18, 2009 at 1:40 pm
I’m highly confused by the inconsistent definitions of student-centered instruction. In one definition, “student learning is the focus of the class.” But what is the focus of the rest of the entry? Precisely those teaching practices that are earlier defined to be at the heart of teacher-centered classes (“in teacher-centered approaches, teaching practices are the focus”). This is a muddle, folks, and I have to agree with the first definition: we should care about student learning. That means that if the best way for students to know the direction of research in a field is a lecture, then a lecture is student-centered. Of course, in many cases lecturing is not the best way for students to learn. But it’s misleading to claim that student-centered always requires shifting control to students. If a lack of structure impedes learning, then it’s horribly anti-student-centered.
Sherman Dorn - September 18, 2009 at 2:25 pm
The phrase that confused me the most, perhaps is “she [Weimer] assumes that student-centered pedagogy is the most appropriate.” On the one hand, I agree with what I think is Billie’s intended meaning — that handing control over to students is not necessarily the right choice. But the reuse of the term “student-centered” when labeling a certain set of practices is inconsistent with the earlier definition of “student-centered” as focused on learning. Maybe we should just toss the term “student-centered” as hopelessly overused, but I know that’s partly my inner education historian talking.
Wait a minute: I am an education historian. Okay, so it’s me talking. Let’s get rid of the term student-centered!
LAM - September 18, 2009 at 1:50 pm
Thanks. This kind of post looks like it will be very helpful.
The link to the book on Amazon is broken. This one works:
http://www.amazon.com/Learner-Centered-Teaching-Five-Changes-Practice/dp/0787956465/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253296206&sr=8-1
Billie Hara - September 18, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Thanks for the corrected link, LAM!
George H. Williams - September 18, 2009 at 2:42 pm
Gotcha. Well, I just plan on waiting to see where Billie (and perhaps other ProfHackers) go with this series of posts.
Billie Hara - September 18, 2009 at 5:39 pm
Sherman and all– I apologize for not being clear in the original post. What I meant was that Weimer assumes student-centered pedagogy is the “best.” I follow that statement (her assumption) with a “maybe is, maybe it isn’t” caveat. Student-centered pedagogy being “best” is dependent upon a number of factors (class size, discipline, etc.). In subsequent posts, ProfHacker explore these ideas– and of course soliciting comments from readers– about best practices. One pedagogical tool that wasn’t listed in this post is content-centered pedagogy . . . it might just trump them all. :-)
Thanks for your feedback.
GC Fiedler - September 19, 2009 at 1:16 am
I’m not up on teaching theory, because it is mostly that – theory. And these labels are subject to being used as broad categorizations (e..g., You liberals!), which isn’t fair.
It seems that most lecture situations would be by default, teacher centric, or even content-centric. Large classes would be by default that way – as the opportunity to interact is minimal. Instructor presents concepts, students follow and perhaps ask questions for clarification. Instructor may query students to get them to sort out concepts very briefly.
If a student is doing all the investigating and information gathering him/herself with little guidance, this would be akin to directed studies or most distance education situations. This could be student centered. Laboratory courses are likely student centered too, but still require guidance/feedback from an instructor.
Courses where the instructor shows a technique or calculation or problem and then has his students repeat similar tasks might also be described as student-centric. But then again, this situation only lends it self to certain disciplines or situations. Many Chemistry and Math departments have teaching labs where students can spend more time practicing with the help of TAs or instructors. Is it fair to say these are better, because they are student centric? I’m not sure they are ‘better’, but a necessity of the discipline rather than a choice of approach.
Regardless of what anyone labels you or your techniques as the metric of quality is if your students learn and understand the material, and are able to apply them in the future.
George H. Williams - September 20, 2009 at 6:57 am
Thank you for the description of that project, Nels. Sounds very interesting.
GC makes a good point: we should try to make sure that the changes we’re implementing in our pedagogy are having the desired outcome. (At least, I’m pretty sure that’s your point, GC. Correct me if I’m wrong, please.) And Nels, what you’ve described is a project that, imho, took great pains to measure outcomes.
I’d like to learn more about valid ways of measuring outcomes in that way, about examples of departments/programs that took steps in systematically to change pedagogy with measurements in place to demonstrate whether those steps did or did not work.
Here’s one little example:
In Spring 2009, Drew Stowe –who was then completing his senior year and working on his capstone project at USC Upstate–approached me about measuring the effectiveness of computer-mediated-communication as compared to face-to-face communication.
We came up with a plan to compare one course unit (one day, really) of my 2 English 102 sections: in one section, students learned about the 3 rhetorical appeals by reading online and then asking questions via email or instant messenger; in the other section, I lectured and then fielded questions. Subsequently, I quizzed the students on the 3 rhetorical appeals to see how well they’d learned the material, and Drew surveyed them about their attitudes towards the method used in that section.
Drew and I realized that this was a tiny, tiny part of the larger question (CMC v. F2F) and that a more comprehensive study would ideally involve an entire semester and a great deal of planning. However, a comprehensive study was beyond the scope of our available time and energy.
In an ideal world, however, a comprehensive evaluation of teaching methods in the composition classroom would make me feel more confident in what I’m doing, more certain about the choices I’m making. I teach 4 courses each semester, however, and starting up such a study takes more time than I currently have available to me.
I’d like to hear what others have done along these lines, however, regardless of discipline.
George H. Williams - September 19, 2009 at 6:28 pm
I don’t think anyone in this thread is telling you not to do what you’re doing if it works for you, GC. If you’re happy with how your classes are going, great!
Derek - September 19, 2009 at 2:59 pm
@GC: I didn’t mean to imply that “all subjects and situations lend themselves to personalized student learning solutions.” I was merely clarifying distinctions I see between student-centered instruction and teacher-centered instruction.
I teach with clickers and, in fact, wrote a book on teaching with clickers. In writing my book, I spoke with dozens of faculty members who teach large lecture courses, sometimes very large ones (600 students at a time). I’m quite aware of the challenges of teaching large classes and those that are jam-packed with content that must be learned by students hoping to progress further in their studies.
Student-centered instruction is much more difficult in these kinds of classes. When I have one student in my office hours, I can be extremely student-centered and have access to a variety of student-centered teaching techniques. When I get five students in my office hours, being student-centered becomes more challenging. Trying to respond in helpful ways to five different learning trajectories / understandings of my discipline all at once is challenging. Handling 20 or 30 or 50 or 200 students at once during class is even more difficult.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t try and do what we can do. That’s one reason I’m a proponent of teaching with clickers. When I have my students respond to a clicker question and find out that, for instance, 30% of my students select the same wrong answer, then I can respond to that appropriately, which helps me target my instruction to the learning needs of the students in front of me. I could just guess that many of my students have that particular misconception and I probably wouldn’t be wrong, but having the in-class, on-the-fly data to help me make teaching decisions certainly doesn’t hurt. Plus, having students discuss the clicker question in pairs before voting helps to engage more students actively in the content, providing them with an activity designed to help them learn, which is also student-centered. Best yet, clickers scale up very well to large classes.
As for note-taking, I think my point regarding student-centered vs. teacher-centered instruction is that in teacher-centered instruction, the teacher does what s/he does and doesn’t really direct the students’ note-taking. With student-centered instruction, the teacher is mindful of what the students are doing in class–how they’re taking notes–and attempts to direct students to take note in more effective ways. It’s still the students’ responsibility to actually take the notes in those ways, of course.
Nels P. Highberg - September 19, 2009 at 10:33 pm
Yes, George is right. If the way you set up lectures gives you the results you want, then there is no need to change. The biology class that I was associated with as a writing consultant was in a department where the faculty were not happy with student learning, so they brought in consultants in various areas and developed a department-wide assessment program where they tracked the grades of all students who took their classes as part of a biology major, bio/chem major, and the like, which was a few hundred students at this school. They incorporated a lot of group work into the lecture sections and a lot of active note-taking systems. They also had some journaling work and more essay questions on exams, which is where I came in. This was almost a decade ago, so clickers were not around, or at least none of us had heard of them at the time. It took time, but they did it together as a department, which really helped develop cohesion over courses. Part of what I think helped is that the same types of activities were consistent across classes, so students got used to them quickly and also knew which kind of activity fit their particular learning styles. They felt the work gave them the results they wanted. If whatever lecture style you have works, keep working it. But there are always options anyone can try in any kind of class if what you have been doing does not give you the results you want. I left soon after, so I don’t know if they ever wrote or published on it.
GC Fiedler - September 19, 2009 at 1:51 pm
Would love to see his data, if it’s more than just a casual observation. And unless he was also teaching those upper level courses, he wouldn’t have access to their grades.
Not saying it won’t work, but takes up a lot of time that we don’t have in our own system.
Nels P. Highberg - September 19, 2009 at 1:44 pm
I used to work as a writing consultant for a professor who taught an introductory biology class to a group of five hundred students, and he did not lecture. He had them working in groups and completing all kinds of various student-centered activities. He found that his students always earned higher grades in the advanced classes than those who took the other intro sections. Sure, lectures can work, but they are rarely the only option. I’ve seen too many examples that prove otherwise.
GC Fiedler - September 19, 2009 at 1:07 pm
You make good use of trendy buzzwords, like empowerment, and you provide a nice idealist viewpoint.
But you seem to forget that not all subjects and situations lend themselves to personalized student learning solutions. In my courses (mostly biology), there’s lots of students and lots of topics to cover in each lecture. If I base my learning outcomes on optimizing each student’s learning system, I’ll never get any lecturing done.
As for note-taking, that is up to the student, not the lecturer, (though we can make suggestions). Some students decide taking notes is less important than paying attention to the lecture/lecturer. Some students like to follow along in their text books (assuming the instructor uses the general sequence of concepts). Some insist on furiously writing down everything the lecturer says / writes / presents. Others jot down shorthand notes, or just material that they need to clarify. Some record lecture audio, and claim to listen to them on their iPods. Regardless, it is up to the student to find their own system.
Similarly, it’s the lecturer’s job to find the best way to deliver face-to-face content (what we used to call lecturing) without overwhelming, offending, or otherwise boring the student. Whether or not you want to label these things as being centered on one thing or another, you still have to be effective.
e.g., Maybe having students sit around tables, making a group diagram and list of cell structures would be a great way to have them learn about the cell, but the time it would take would be enormous. (Which is why we have lab classes.) It would not be effective for anything other than that one concept.
Derek - September 19, 2009 at 11:20 am
Very interesting discussion. I firmly believe that theory can help us make sense of and improve our practice, so I think it’s worth exploring various definitions of student-centered instruction. I would argue that student-centered instruction…
Values student-learning as the end goal of teaching.
Recognizes that each student brings to the learning process a unique mix of prior knowledge, experiences, and perspectives that affect how they make sense of new information.
Pays attention not only to what activities and roles the instructor plays in the learning process, but also to the activities and roles that students play.
Designs learning experiences for students that empower students to take responsibility for their own learning without ceding all control of the learning process to the students.
Regarding that last point, student-centered instruction is not necessarily student-controlled instruction.
Regarding point #3, one of the reasons lectures are not often student-centered is that the student role during lectures is often nothing more than taking notes. Taking notes can be a valuable learning experience, but only if students are using the note-taking process to actively make sense of the material. If they’re merely transcribing instructor comments for later deciphering, then the student role in this learning process is a minimal one. Student-centered instruction seeks to provide students with learning experiences in which the students play more active roles.
tantriuhamka - March 12, 2010 at 7:11 am
Actually, I am still confused with my style of teaching. I have been observed twice by the education experts and they told me that I am still using teacher as centered of the learning activity. In my mind when I want to teach about the new materials I should explain it first to build a new knowledge of the material. Of course I make an interaction with my students in teaching and learning activities to arose them to be aware of the lesson. I don’t absolutely cover all the activities in my classroom, but when I see my students are passive I try to them to be active, I have to guide them to understand the materials. And the when I finish explaining the new materials I ask them to discuss in a group and to prepare some questions that the other groups will answer the questions. At the end of the learning activities I make a conclusion of their questions. We help the students but we have to give them responsibility and to improve their knowledge.