Learner-centric and Teacher-centric Education

What does it mean to be a Teacher in the 21st Century? There has been a paradigm shift within the teaching profession over the past decade. The role of teachers has changed to reflect the current focus on learning management and learner-centric approaches to education. As a pre-service teacher at CQUniversity, my education and professional preparation will be underpinned by the learning design process, the dimensions of learning, as well as other concepts and approaches we now know to be integral to the achievement of learning outcomes in 21st Century classrooms, including; learning engagement and information communication technologies.

Teacher-centred (direct instruction, deductive or expository) learning, dominates the traditional view of what teachers ‘do’ (Killen, 2003). Here, the teacher controls what is taught and how information is presented (personified by a ‘chalk and talk’ approach). There is minimal student interaction or substantive conversation between teachers and students. At this end of the teacher-centred – learner-centred spectrum, it is easy to see, that with such minimal participation, students would find it difficult to engage in learning experiences. From what I recall of my own primary education in the early 1990’s, the teaching of curriculum generally gave way to my individual needs and preferences as a learner. My teachers had the class copy information from a blackboard and their pedagogies tended to concentrate on imparting the knowledge they deemed important. In relation to Dale's Cone, my primary education in particular was quite passive, as verbal and visual symbols dominated. Mind you, I was generally more interested in sport and athletics when I was in Primary school. At the bottom of this post you will find an image of me when I was in Year 5.

In a learner-centered approach to teaching, teachers (or more precisely, ‘learning managers’) act as facilitators of student learning, negotiating with students what path their content learning will take. In devising learning design, teachers take into consideration what their students already know, what their students want to know, and how their student’s best learn and want to learn (Lynch, 2003). Nonetheless, as Scot Alred, pointed out in an ICTs tutorial earlier this month, teacher-centred practices have their place in modern classrooms and can be used alongside more learner-centred approaches.

For example, in a Year 11 IT class, a teacher might ask their students what they would like to know more about and the class responds, basic HTML. The teacher might then proceed to outline how HTML codes are created for websites - writing an example on the whiteboard. Although the explanation of HTML in this lesson was essentially didactic in nature, the teacher was responding to their student’s learning request. Thus, the students were at the centre, and the learning experience can be deemed learner-centric, even though didactic teacher instruction was included.

As learning managers, we must keep in mind that the ultimate goal of education is learning (and indeed, learning for understanding). As Killen (2003, p. 2) puts it, “[our learners] should be at the centre of all teaching.” This learner-centred approach is reflected in the process of learning management, Learning Engagement Theory, Lynch’s 8 Learning Management Questions and Marzano and Pickering’s 5 Dimensions of Learning.

So what is learning management? Over the past decade, learning management has emerged as a dominate approach to teaching. Smith (2000) describes learning management as the capacity to design pedagogic strategies that achieve learning outcomes in students. The Learning Management process involves asking 8 learning management questions (LMQ's), spanning three stages (Profiling, Strategising & Delivery, and Ascertainment). The emphasis of the learning management process is on achieving learning for students, and the teaching strategies we use, are the keys to successfully achieving these learning outcomes. But what teaching strategies should we use to teach the youth of today, and how can we apply them in a motivating and engaging way? Are purely teacher-centric teaching strategies a ‘thing’ of the past?

As teachers of the 21st Century, we are teaching the youth of generation X, the ‘I want everything I want it now’ generation, children and young adults who were born into a digital revolution, people who seemingly can’t live without their mobile phone or the internet and not to mention a multitude of other emerging technologies. To successfully achieve student outcomes, learning managers need to learn how to spark the curiosity of young minds, connect with our students, and cater to their diverse learning needs. This can be achieved through the integration of ICTs. My future blogs will address the issue of learning engagement and ICTs can be applied in the classrooms of today.

Image source: Personal Photo