Post 30: Learner Centered Classroom

Learner Centered Classroom

Guide by the Side

When you have a Learner Centered classroom, the learner, not the teacher is the focus of the class. The learner is the center of the teaching and learning experience. The faculty mentor, directs the learning experience of the student. The Learner is expected to attain knowledge, skills and perspectives from the simple concept (memorization) to a more abstract concept (analysis, creation).

Here are the Core Learning Principles of a Learner Centered Classroom

1. Every structured learning experience is built around the learner. Each learner brings their own personalized experience to the classroom.

2. Faculty are the guides who guide the students in their learning.Faculty no longer just lectures anymore as in a Teacher centered classroom. Instead, faculty act as mentors and directors of student learning experience.

3.All learners do not need to learn all course content, just the core concepts.

4. Every learning experience includes the environment or context to which the learner interacts.

5. Every learner has a certain level of knowledge of the topic. Some learners are beginners, others are advanced.

6. Students learn in small bits of knowledge known as clusters.

7. Learners are encouraged to be active participants in the class and not just passive receivers of knowledge. (Boettcher, Conrad, 25)

These Core Learning Principles come from the book, The Online Teaching Survival Guide by Judith V Boettcher, Rita Marie Conrad.

The Learner is encouraged to participate in his own learning. The Learner is actively doing something. guided by faculty. In other words, as the student learns, he constructs his own knowledge and constructs his own skills with the help of the teacher.

How can a teacher get to know the students' knowledge structure? How does faculty know if students are beginners or advanced?

For my composition class, when I teach face to face, I have students write me a paragraph in class talking about themselves on the first day of class. I then see how well students in my class write. Do they have good sentence structure? good paragraph structure? Do they make a lot of grammar/punctuation mistakes? Then I do a needs analysis and develop my lessons around the skill level of that class.  Like Forrest Gump used to say, 'You never know what you are gonna get.'

In my online classes, I can tell the writing level of my students by how they write their introduction posts in the discussion forums.  If I notice a student writing very poorly in their introduction, but their paper looks very polished with no errors, then I can suspect plagiarism. This goes in both my face to face class and my online class.

Once I know what knowledge level my class is at, I can begin developing lessons for that class that fits the needs of those learners. I can design activities for those learners that fits the knowledge level of those students. What's most important is that I develop material that fits the 'zone of approximate development' as Vygotsky called or as Krashen says, input + 1 in his input hypothesis, that is the skill level of that student, then I can start teaching the class.  I want to design lessons that engage the student and that enables tohe student to be engaged with the content.

In other words, faculty relinquish control of the classroom and render the power to the students allowing students to collaborate together to learn content or do group work. This is much  more interesting to students than listening to a boring lecture from a teacher. Some examples of collaborative work I have designed in my ENGL 101 Composition classes is that I would have online students peer review rough drafts of each other's paper before the students hand in their final draft in the assignment portal. Students love the feedback they get from each other and they love getting feedback from me as well. When students work together, they get a lot more out of the class material and they learn by doing.