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-garde, 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-garde 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-garde 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-garde 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-garde 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-garde 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.

Last Friday, Dr. John Volker and I had a conversation about online and hybrid courses that has left me thinking. First, Dr. Volker recited the all-too-common reason for a professor’s resisting online educational trends: The students don’t get the same out of an online course that they get out of an on-ground course. Then Dr. Volker pointed out another variation of that same complaint: Students don’t get as much out of an online course as they do from an on-ground course. Dr. Volker agreed with the first point but not with the second. Why?

When a teacher chooses the on-ground classroom model as the basis for online interaction, Achilles never catches the tortoise. When a teacher designs a digital interaction to simulate a traditional one, all the students get is an inferior imitation that will never catch up with the real thing.

Does this mean we teachers should resist online educational opportunities? Is Achilles really an inferior imitation of a tortoise? Absolutely not, Dr. Volker insists. We instead should abandon the on-ground model when we design online interactions. Let Achilles run his own path.

Classroom interactions have an embodied crowd effect. If a teacher can generate enough personal, kinetic excitement for the material, that excitement spreads relatively easily to those students who are already engaged. Through these students’ overt excitement, other students who are more interested in their classmates than in the material, in turn, can develop vicarious interest in the material. And even vicarious, sustained interest increases the likelihood of learning.

However, online course interactions have different dynamics than those of an on-ground course. A classroom discussion might silence some shy students who are concerned about how they are perceived. But a disembodied engagement might offer those students the masks — or in digital terminology, the avatars — they need to protect their senses of self from the fires of heated intellectual confrontations.

I don’t want to suggest that this or any other difference we encounter in an online setting is always a benefit. The mask effect can embolden some students to the point of their initiating “flame wars” — or in lay terms, those unproductive contests for domination that sometimes transpire in a discussion-board setting. Where digital engagements differ from on-ground interactions, problems can arise. But those problems often unveil sites where we haven’t adequately reconceptualized online interaction. In other words, the mask effect that produces flame wars is not inherently an obstacle to the learning process.

What are some other potential benefits of an online setting?

The most common answer has to do with the difference in students’ learning styles. Many students have to utilize multiple modes of engagement — visual, auditory, read/write, kinesthetic — before they’ll fully grasp the course material. Others need to be able to access the course material in one specific mode. An online interface can host a variety of learning opportunities in an array of different mediums.

But an on-ground course also can diversify modes of engagement for diverse learning styles. So what is distinctive about an online environment?

There are two distinctions in particular that draw me to online learning environments. First, digital mediums potentially level the playing field for the different learning styles. What does that mean? Those who learn the easiest by reading and writing (such as those students who become teachers) traditionally have had an advantage over other students — to a large degree because reading and writing are both recursive activities. In other words, text is reviewable both in selective parts and as a whole. Students who learn the easiest by reading and writing can revisit course material either in specific areas of uncertainty or as a global narrative. For other students, the course material ends up reduced to a collection of classroom activities — singular events that fade per the human limitations of memory.

Digital mediums attribute the recursive characteristic of written text to non-written mediums. If students need to pause and review the last few moments of a lecture, they can. In an online environment, kinetic learners can actively and repeatedly engage with what in a classroom or a textbook might be little more than a stable diagram.

In fact, as far as kinetic learners are concerned, hypertext reconfigures written text into a tactile experience. That is, digital mediums level the playing field by attributing not only the characteristics of written text to non-written mediums, but also the characteristics of non-written mediums to written text.

Although digital mediums undoubtedly help students who are not inclined to learn through reading or writing, digital mediums similarly help those who do prefer reading and writing. Both teachers and students can write on videos and thereby attribute the quality of written text to visual and auditory learning experiences. In other words, digital mediums potentially level the learning playing field, not by handicapping those who excel in more traditional environments, but rather by opening up each and every learning opportunity to every learning style.

The second distinction that draws me to online learning environments has less to do with D2L, Angel, Blackboard, or other course-shell providers than with the free online learning activities, like blogging and microblogging. A professor can require that students blog or microblog about their learning experiences, link their monologues to an extracurricular online community about that particular topic, and thereby increase the likelihood that their students will remain engaged in a learning community about that topic even beyond the termination of the course. If we tie our students’ learning to the confines of a course, that learning can end with the completion of the semester. If we tie that learning to a more permanent community, our students’ learning, even about a particular topic, will likely become more permanent.

These are just two of what are possibly an infinite number of potentially positive ways that an online environment can uniquely contribute to the learning experience. In other words, Dr. Volker is right. Students don’t get the same out of an online course that they get out of an on-ground course, and if we teachers take the time to analyze how online environments differ from classroom environments, we can transform those differences into an improved learning experience.

Most teachers have taught articulate and assertive female students. But men and women tend to have different styles. Even though both are equally valid, the male style usually dominates in the classroom. As a result, women may not get as much out of their discussion sections as men do. (Romano 1994)

The standard approach to the role of gender in the classroom involves a discussion of overt and covert forms of sexism: inappropriate sexual advances, gender-based recognition or neglect, and last but not least, the all-too-common social misconceptions that discourage a particular gender from choosing a certain major — and thereby halve a department’s potential recruitment of talent. All of these factors negatively impact both student performance and retention rates (See Hall and Sandler 1982). Not to mention, they also postpone the dawn of a new era.

However, with the growing attention to different learning styles, we might occasionally encounter a different line of questioning: Do men and women learn differently? This question is potentially dangerous because it too readily invites some of the common stereotypes that ultimately inhibit student performance and retention: men are more attuned to reason, women to emotions, etc.

And yet, ongoing scholarship would suggest that the question is relevant.

According to a Harvard study, a rigorous admissions process does not standardize the learning process for men and women in such a way that women can compete in the classroom (Krupnick 1985). Drawing from the sociological and anthropological research of Janet Lever, Marjorie Harness Goodwin, and Donna Eder, Deborah Tannen proposes one possible reason. Tannen argues that because most girls learn to use language in small groups centered on private, intimate conversations, and because most boys develop their language skills in larger, far less intimate and more competitive groups, classroom discussion ultimately favors male students. Why? Because classroom discussion “entails putting oneself forward in front of a large group of people, many of whom are strangers and at least one of whom is sure to judge speakers’ knowledge and intelligence by their verbal display.” Tannen believes that — whereas a classroom discussion might suit most male students since they have learned their language skills in structurally similar environments — smaller, more intimate group settings might better suit most female students (Tannen 1991).

Tannen agrees with Walter J. Ong’s characterization (see Ong 1981) of the debate model that teachers traditionally have used for classroom activities. Both critics see the debate format as unfairly benefiting the male gender. In fact, Tannen calls attention to the way instructors question and challenge their students. In her estimation, while most male students might learn from direct intellectual confrontation, female students likely learn more from personal anecdotes.

Yet, Tannen’s analysis is over fifteen-years old, and both the Harvard study and Ong’s characterization are over twenty. Is it not possible that their descriptions of difference encourage outdated generalizations about gender differences? Would it not be disadvantageous for both genders if a professor were to direct intellectual confrontations only to male students and personal anecdotes only to female students?

Tannen’s argument draws from research on, yes, gender discrepancies, but more specifically on the role of gender in games. The longstanding generalization is that whereas girls play in small, fairly intimate groups indoors, boys play outdoors in larger more competitive groups that are more conducive to engagements with strangers. To what extent do our genders inform the games we play, and to what extent do the games we play inform our genders? These different play settings at very least affect each gender’s relationship with language and learning skills.

However, the growing popularity of video games and other digital technologies might both shrink those gender differences and radically pluralize individual learning styles. How younger generations develop language and learning skills is increasingly less reliant on gender and more dependent on each individual’s social-networking strategies. Does a student prefer structured games in which a single person or team can win? Or does he or she socially interact through games or in virtual worlds that lack uniform rules, objectives, winners, or losers? Will the student text-message friends and family only privately, or through social-networking sites such as Facebook or microblogging services like Twitter that often extend communication to strangers? Likely these communication decisions will affect learning styles more than gender will.

Nevertheless, as you run searches on “learning styles” in order to improve your own teaching practices, you may encounter statistical or other studies that researchers have stratified along gender lines. For example, a 2007 study of 86 students enrolled in an upper-division physiology lab at Michigan State University revealed that whereas 87.5% of the male students preferred multiple learning modes (visual, auditory, reading and writing, and kinesthetic), 54.2% of the female students favored learning from a single mode of presentation. And the differences did not end there (See Wehrwein, Lujan, and DiCarlo 2007). Although a sample of 86 students is not large enough to draw broader conclusions about even MSU students, let alone physiology majors in higher education or cross-the-board gender differences, such studies are informative. What they reveal is the broad range of different learning styles that sometimes fall along gender lines. Problems arise only when we use that data to make generalized gender distinctions that in turn affect the way we organize gender in the classroom.

One website cites a study of kindergarten games to support the hypothesis that “girls prefer to relate to people, whereas boys ‘relate’ to objects.” But if we are looking to avoid the generalizations that lead to our policing gender norms and thereby disenfranchising difference in the classroom, perhaps a more productive statement might be, “some students prefer to relate to people, whereas others ‘relate’ better to objects.” Why? The latter statement encourages us to cater our classroom activities to different learning styles without enforcing a gender separation to accomplish that objective.

There is nothing more disenfranchising in a classroom than a professor’s using generalizations to enforce differences among students. Student-centered teaching does not mean socially divisive classroom activities: girls on one side of the room, boys on the other. On the contrary, student-centered teaching unites the social body by drawing from and appealing to the learning styles of everyone. We have an opportunity to recast our classrooms in the dawn of a pedagogically new era.

The following teaching tips come from Renee Romano’s “Gender Issues in Teaching”:

1. Keep a log of which students speak and for how long. Watch for patterns over several weeks. Try to identify the dominant and subordinate groups in your classroom.

2. Have an outside observer come to your class and ask them to pay particular attention to patterns of participation and interruption.

3. Ask your students how they feel about the classroom atmosphere, or have someone from CETL do a small group evaluation in your class.

REFERENCES

Renee Romano. “Gender Issues in Teaching: Does Nurturing Academic Success in Women Mean Rethinking Some of What We Do in the Classroom?” Speaking of Teaching; Stanford University Newsletter on Teaching. FALL 1994, Vol. 6, No. 1.: http://ctl.stanford.edu/Newsletter/gender.pdf (found on 7/13/09).

Hall, Roberta and Bernice R. Sandler. “The Classroom Climate: A Chilly One for Women?” Washington, D.C.: Association of American Colleges, 1982.

Krupnick, Catherine. “Women and Men in the Classroom: Inequality and Its Remedies.” On Teaching and Learning: The Journal of the Harvard-Danforth Center. (May, 1985): 19-25.

Tannen, Deborah. “Teachers’ Classroom Strategies Should Recognize that Men and Women Use Language Differently.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, vol. XXXVII, no. 40. (June 19, 1991); http://www.iub.edu/~tchsotl/part2/TannenTeachers%27%20classroom%20strategies (found on 7/13/09).

Ong, Walter J. Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.

Wehrwein, Erica A., Heidi L. Lujan, and Stephen E. DiCarlo. “Gender Differences in Learning Style Preferences among Undergraduate Physiology Students.” Advances in Physiology Education; 31: 153-157, 2007.