Ticklish Ears

I continue to make my way through Weimer’s Learner-Centered Teaching. Recall that Weimer covers five areas where change needs to occur for effective learner-centered teaching. The first two had to do with power in the classroom (i.e., how much do you let the students “take charge”) and content. The third area is covered in Chapter 4, The Role of the Teacher, which I just finished.

What Weimer says will no doubt make traditionalists scream:

Our continued insistence on always being at the center of classroom activities directly compromises attempts we make to be learner-centered. We must move aside, often and regularly (p. 74).

Obviously, we don’t leave the classroom, but we are no longer the center of attention. Metaphors that Weimer brings up include that of gardener (blechh! Too new-agey), guide, coach, and orchestra leader. The middle two strike me as the most apt.

Here’s a key quote justifying this approach:

What students do and do not learn starts driving the instructional decision-making process (p. 77, emphasis mine).

The reason I like this particular passage is that it portrays the classroom as a reactive system (reactive in the technical sense, not the pejorative sense). When the instructor moves into a role that allows him to better observe the learning process, he can adjust the process in real-time, optimizing the learning for each student, if possible. What a concept! This is hard to do just lecturing from the front of the class.

And we are talking about moving away from relying on the lecture mode. I’ve not been shy about saying that in past posts. You can claim that students can participate during a lecture by asking questions or answering those thrown out by the professor, but let’s face it, we usually get nowhere near 100% participation. If you have a solution that gets significantly improved student participation without a shift from the lecture mode, I’d be glad to hear about it.

Anyway, besides the idea of on-the-fly adjustment of the process, the other significant point I took away from this chapter was that this shift from the front of the room is going to take a lot of work. As Weimer says:

The instructional design aspects of the teacher’s role are much more important in learner-centered environments. Activities and assignment become the vehicles by and through which learning occurs (p. 85).

Hard. Work.

If I haven’t said it yet, the book is well worth reading for those of us who want to improve our college classroom experiences.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 3rd, 2005 at 10:08 pm and is filed under Academia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.