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Creating a Student-Centered Classroom
www.gwangjunewsgic.com
February 2021
TEACHING & LEARNING
By Dr. David E. Shaffer
W
hen I began teaching English in Korea, standard practice was to introduce new words by writing them on the blackboard (yes, they were black), saying the new lexical item several times, then explaining its meaning and using it in a sentence. The teacher might follow up by asking a student or two to make their own sentence using the new lexical item before handing out a worksheet to everyone. The worksheet might include a matching exercise, where students were to match the words in one column with their definitions in the other. A second exercise might be to write each of the new words in a sentence. And with this exposure, the student was expected to “learn” the new word, which in most cases required memorization. The banking model of education was trending. The term was coined by Paulo Freire (1970) as a metaphor of students as containers to be filled with knowledge by the teacher, that is, to receive, file, and store the deposits. The transfer of knowledge was thought of as being unidirectional, from the teacher to the student, much like an online bank transfer is now made. Freire was the first to criticize this traditional banking model, but in time, many would follow. The banking model is a teacher-centered approach to learning. In this conventional approach, the teacher functions as the presenter of information to students, who are expected to passively receive it. It is still quite commonly found in Korea in many university lecture halls and in even more high school classrooms, whether it is an English classroom or that of another subject. The relative inefficiencies associated with teacher-centered learning have led to the development of student-centered learning, where the focus is on the student in the learning process rather than constantly on the teacher.
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Let us look at both the teacher- and student-centered learning approaches and consider their advantages and drawbacks to show how focusing more on the student can make for a more enjoyable as well as effective learning environment.
The Teacher-Centered Approach
As teacher-centered learning has been the mainstay of classroom instruction for such a long period of time, it surely has some strong points. When instruction is centered on the teacher, the teacher assumes total control of the lesson and the students’ activities. That is, the class is orderly and the classroom is quiet. With the teacher taking direct responsibility for student learning, the class benefits from the focused approach to the lesson derived from the teacher’s carefully laid preparation and lesson plans. As the teacher has control of the class, they easily feel a sense of confidence in their teaching – self-assured that all students are provided with the same material and none are missing out. Also, student confusion is minimalized, as they always know that their attention is to be on the teacher. From the above, you may have deduced that with the teacher-centered approach, students work alone. Interaction with other students is discouraged (“Quiet, please!” “Do your own work!”). Since students participate individually, the burden is on the teacher to make the lesson highly interesting. If the teacher cannot hold the students’ interest, they will easily become bored, minds will wander, and learning will not take place. Collaborative activities such as pair work, group work, and project work are not part of the lesson, so students do not have the opportunity to share in discoveries, as is common in inquiry-based learning. Without collaborative activities, students have fewer opportunities to develop
1/26/2021 10:08:03 AM
