Center for Teaching and Learning

What is a student-centered approach to designing and teaching a course? From a student-centered perspective, how does a teacher determine learning outcomes? How can she build assignments that facilitate the students’ achievement of those outcomes? How might a teacher write lectures and other supplemental materials that keep the students productively engaged with those assignments — that is, how does a teacher do this from a student-centered perspective? Obviously these questions are open to debate. And even more to the point, there is no one answer for any one of those questions.

So what are some of the debates?

A growing number of teachers imagine how and why different types of students encounter and relate to each learning opportunity: communal learners, solitary learners, visual learners, kinesthetic learners, millennial learners, adult learners…. Although the list is potentially endless, ultimately arbitrary, and likely inaccurate, even the most avant-gard, student-centered teacher often relies on some working list as a starting point for rethinking the course from multiple points of view.

Those points of view are cookie-cutter interpretations. Human eyes — specific students’ eyes — don’t look through them. And yet, is not this initial stage of designing a course the central crux of student-centered pedagogies — if not in the ways those pedagogies are practiced, then in the ways they’re written, published, and otherwise presented?

For a proponent of the above pedagogical approach to claim that what a more traditional teacher does is not student-centered — well, that’s just offensive. What even the most avant-gard teacher has to remember is that the more traditional approaches are also student-centered.

Yes, the traditional course-designing process may lean heavily on the teacher’s side of perceiving the course and its delivery systems: what a student should accomplish, how a student should accomplish it…. But even the more radically student-centered teachers have to determine learning objectives from additional perspectives, not just from the students’. In other words, the pedagogical debate about student-centered teaching is not between opposites. There’s no such thing as pro- or anti-student-centered teaching.

Once a more traditional teacher gets to know his students, he contemplates the specific problems certain students are having — only without referring to generalizations or types.

So where’s the argument?

More traditional teachers object to the reliance on stereotypes about students. Not every student of a certain age is a “millennial student.” Not every student of a certain age fits the description of an “adult learner.” A teacher’s reliance on those inevitably false categories can hurt students more than help them.

Even the most avant-gard teacher has to agree with those claims. Regardless of how different articles or guest speakers may define our students, we ultimately can’t define our students. We have to know them.

More traditional teachers disagree with the abandonment of the lectern and other time-weathered course-delivery systems for ultimately untested pedagogical fads.

The avant-gard teacher might cite data to show that time-weathered course-delivery systems are no longer working. And the traditional teacher might point out that a lot of these avant-gard techniques infiltrated the secondary educational system in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s; he could argue that consequently, today’s college students are inadequately prepared. She might identify that if incoming students are under-prepared, classroom sizes and the need to teach to standardized tests play a role: they restrict students’ abilities to practice critical-thinking and problem-solving skills. She could argue that, meanwhile, the student body has diversified in ways that traditional teaching methods haven’t been able to accommodate. But no one will win this argument. The data tells us only what, not why.

Traditional teachers often see redesigning a course from the students’ perspective as essentially dumbing down the course. Forfeiting the dissemination of facts for building students’ abilities and attitudes, according to the traditional perspective, does not adequately prepare students for the next course in the curriculum: We’re doing them a disservice by not providing them with the basics. And often because of this line of reasoning, many traditional teachers interpret the political, social, and administrative calls for educational reform as in fact encouraging lower educational standards.

The more avant-gard teacher might argue that one can always look up facts. Google on a web-based phone replaces encyclopedic memories. True understanding, which has less to do with what than with how and why, is more important for the next course in the curriculum — not to mention, for our current students’ future professions and lives.

I’ve tried to polarize this debate as much as possible. But in truth, most of what occurs in classrooms are compromises. Even those who make any one of these arguments will appropriate ideas and practices from the other side. The dividing line no longer exists. But the divisive conversations still do — and should continue to — until the data catches up with the interpretations.

The following two videos are of a workshop on classroom-assessment techniques (CATs) from Austin Peay’s 2009 Summer Teaching Academy. CATs are not merely different techniques for assessing students. They are a part of a larger strategy to assess the accessibility of lectures, promote active learning, revise the next day’s lecture to accommodate the students’ needs, and create a truly student-centered environment even in a high-enrollment course.

Classroom Assessment Techniques 1

Classroom Assessment Techniques 2

Both at Austin Peay and nationwide, course redesign has become a popular means of improving the retention of students. The idea behind course redesign is not to lower our expectations of students so that more students pass, but rather to rethink the ways we teach a course in order to better accommodate our students’ learning processes. So how do we brainstorm a redesign proposal? What should we take into consideration?

A standard way we can increase our students’ access to course material is to offer them many points of entry into that material. We can provide visual, auditory, read/write, and kinesthetic options for our students to satisfy each learning objective. Some students have even undisclosed learning disabilities that impose obstacles to one particular learning style. Other students prefer one learning style over another. Often, students require the use of multiple learning styles before they can put all the pieces of the puzzle together. How can we provide these multiple options for our students to satisfy each learning objective?

It is true that most redesign efforts broach differences in students’ learning styles by hosting the course material in a variety of media online — or through purchased computer programs that purportedly resolve those differences. These technological approaches, however, do not always work.

What if a D2L shell becomes a mere repository for uploaded materials? Only those students who are already motivated to take the learning process into their own hands will bother with the uploaded resources. Moreover, not even those more motivated students are guaranteed to benefit from those resources. Without guidance, even motivated students can experience what we might call a “Baskin-Robins paralysis”: When there are a 101 options, many people don’t know which ones to choose and become paralyzed with indecision and inaction. Uploaded materials do not inherently encourage the students’ engagement, especially when those uploaded materials are not interactive.

Let us not forget the social element. No matter how good they are, neither digital resources nor purchased computer programs can resolve learning differences without a teacher’s drawing those diverse digital examples and exercises into class discussions. Most students learn socially. Until they experience other people’s interest in a topic and associate that topic with their own personal objectives (classroom social status or some higher objective), information remains meaningless to them. It lacks social signification.

The simple solution to all of these problems: departmental workshops.

1.) The more faculty members discuss how to encourage students to access learning resources, the more their students might use those resources.

2.) The more faculty members share with each other strategies for guiding students, for teaching them how to choose appropriate resources for their own specific learning habits, the more their students might discover an intimate relationship with learning.

3.) The more faculty members experiment with creating interactive course materials, the more their students might interact with those materials and retain some of that material under their fingernails — and perhaps more importantly, bring it with them, even beyond the confines of the course.

4.) The more faculty members explore how to take students’ solitary learning activities and transform them into social engagements, the more their students might engage the material while alone, specifically in order to interact better with their peers in the learning community.

Regular departmental conversations are important for a successful course redesign.

What if the departmental culture opposes a technologically enhanced course? Neither targeting different learning styles nor any of the four points outlined above requires technology. Technology is a tool, not an objective.

Student engagement with the material is the objective. An increase of student engagement will improve retention and graduation rates and enhance student learning. Brainstorm how to achieve the objective, not how to use technology in the classroom. Both your peers and students will thank you for it.