By Marsha Lovett Feb 24, 2016
in "How to Move from First-Person to Learner-Centered Teaching"
When we think about what we need to accomplish during a semester, we tend to think in terms of the information we need to get in front of students. What we really want to accomplish is a change in their skills and knowledge. Learning is change, and learner-centered instruction is based on fostering it.
The most reliable way to do that is to create opportunities for practice and feedback. It is tricky to know where to fit more practice in, and you may fear that more practice means more grading, but not necessarily. For example, you can design activities where students learn to give feedback to one another or even to themselves by applying a rubric to their work.
Technology is enabling many teachers to improve the quantity and quality of practice and feedback. Some of the most exciting innovations in this area blend face-to-face teaching with adaptive learning courseware that creates frequent practice opportunities and gives timely and targeted feedback. Even in very large enrollment courses, the technology can observe what students know and where they are in the change process, and it can therefore personalize the learning experience at scale. Moreover, the technology can also provide you with this information so you have a better gauge on your students’ learning states.
Take a LEGO Approach
Tearing up our scripts and rebuilding our classes using learner-centered teaching principles isn’t practical for most of us. The good news is that benefitting from the learning science on this subject doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing. You can “modularize” these tactics and introduce them one piece at a time, learning and improving as you go.
Faculty can succeed at learner-centered learning when they take small steps to remove themselves from the action and let students be the heroes of their stories. If teachers do that even for just for a few minutes it can have a real impact on learning gains.
Read the whole article at https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-02-24-how-to-move-from-first-person-to-learner-centered-teaching