Reflection On Student Centered Learning

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Throughout my undergraduate teacher training courses and into the first two years of my teaching career, I was pressed to believe that “good” teachers lead quiet, highly-structured classrooms. Teachers deliver lessons, students complete assigned tasks, teachers assesses, repeat. Lee & Hannafin (2006) note that “traditionally, curriculum and teaching methods were characterized as emphasizing compliant understanding, expecting and receiving explicit directions from instructors...” (p. 709). Within this sterile learning environment, I saw school-wide challenges that many of the teachers and students were facing- a severe lack motivation, choice, inquiry, and engagement. My students and I grew bored, disinterested, and unmotivated, yet all the while, my observers praised my teaching methods and classroom “management”. As a new teacher I found this disheartening.
I was relieved after I began teaching in a different school district where I was encouraged to implement teaching techniques that involved my students in engaging opportunities of inquiry and collaboration. And as I began graduate coursework in Curriculum Studies I started to truly grasp the fundamental aspects of student centered learning (SCL). Student-centered learning is supported by some of the most influential theorists, “...such as Dewey, Montessori, Rousseau, and Paulo Freire, all of whom posited sometimes quite different versions of student-centeredness” (Newman, 2013, p. 164). While there are numerous

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