Helping Students Learn in a Learner-Centered Environment

A Guide to Facilitating Learning in Higher Education

Terry Doyle

• Editorial: Stylus Publishing
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781620360576
• Categoría: Bildung
• Categoría: Hochschulausbildung

Before entering higher education, most students' learning experiences have been traditional and teacher-centered. Their teachers have typically controlled their learning, with students having had little say about what and how to learn. For many students, encountering a learner-centered environment will be new, possibly unsettling, and may even engender resistance and hostility.Taking as his starting point students' attitudes toward, and unfamiliarity with, learner-centered classrooms, Terry Doyle explains that motivating students to engage with this practice first of all requires explaining its underlying rationale, and then providing guidance on how to learn in this environment. This book is about how to help students acquire the new skills and knowledge they need to take on unfamiliar roles and responsibilities. It is informed by the author's extensive experience in managing learner-centered classes, and by his consultation work with faculty.The first four chapters focus on the importance of imparting to students the evidence and underlying philosophy that is driving higher education to move from a teacher-centered to a learner-centered practice, and what this means for students in terms of having control over, and making important choices about, their learning. The final eight chapters focus on how to impart the skills that students need to learn or hone if they are to be effective learners in an environment that is new to them. The book covers such practices as learning on one's own; creating meaningful learning when collaborating with others; peer teaching; making presentations; developing life long learning skills; self and peer evaluation; and give meaningful feedback.This book provides a rich and informative answer to the fundamental question: how do I help my students adjust to a learner-centered practice?

1

OPTIMIZING STUDENTS’ LEARNING

Many people who had difficulty in school might have prospered in their learning had the new ideas about effective instructional practices been available at the time. Furthermore, even those who did well in traditional educational environments might have developed skills, knowledge, and attitudes that would have significantly enhanced their achievements (Bransford et al., 2000, p. 5).

I began my teaching career as a reading teacher in 1972. In 1974, I was hired as a reading consultant for a rural northern Michigan school district. In this position I had the wonderful opportunity to take part in a yearlong development program for teachers of reading sponsored by the state of Michigan. This program, called The Right to Read, brought together reading consultants and teachers from across Michigan to work with leading researchers and practitioners of the reading process.

One of the first people who visited with our group had spent a great deal of his life working in adult literacy programs. As a young reading consultant, I had an interest in adult literacy and was looking forward to hearing about how to help adults learn to read. I was especially interested in discovering what specific reading techniques and materials I should use. My mind was filled with the teacher-centered questions that a young teacher working in 1974 often asked.

But instead of talking about strategies and materials, the speaker spent most of his time talking about the powerful changes that occur in families when the family leader transitions from being dependent on other family members for his or her literacy needs to no longer needing them. He talked about how important it was to teach families how to adjust to this new kind of independence. I had never stopped to think that a good deed like bringing literacy to an adult could in fact have significant effects on the person’s family members, some of which might be difficult to adjust to. This powerful lesson of how one person’s desire for self-improvement can affect so many other people has remained etched in my memory. What I learned from this lesson I have ingrained in my teaching, and, whenever I think about changing my teaching methods, I know that I first need to consider the implications for my students and what help they might need to adjust to the changes.

When we consider changing our teaching, there are many questions we need to ask beyond the very important question, Does the new approach enhance students’ learning? For example, when a teacher decides that he or she is going to begin using small groups, the teacher needs to consider how this change will affect the students. Questions such as the following all need to be answered if the group work is to be successful, regardless of what the research says about how group work can benefit learning:

• Do the students understand why I want them to learn in small groups?

• Do they know how to work together in small groups?

• Do they know how to communicate with each other without my guiding the interaction?

• Are they able to figure out on their own what roles each member is to play in the group?

Learning how to help our students adjust to the changes that a learnercentered teaching approach requires of them is the central purpose of this book. As faculty members who have adopted a learner-centered approach to teaching, we must be willing to help our students become successful learners in a learner-centered environment. For most of our students, this learnercentered environment will be a significant departure from their earlier learning experiences, and they will not be able to adjust to it on their own. It will disrupt the expectations of schooling that have become hard-wired in their brains over the previous 12–16 years. It will change their responsibilities and their roles by asking them to take on many of the functions for which the teacher used to be responsible. These role changes will also represent more work for students.

In Redesigning Higher Education (1994), Gardiner points out ‘‘that if our students do not understand the learning process—the chief engine of education—they are not going to learn very much in our courses no matter what we do. One of the most valuable actions we could take to improve learning—and thus the productivity of both our students and our institutions—would be to teach our students how to learn.’’ Gardiner’s recommendation gains even more importance and greater validity in a learner-centered environment, where the traditional roles of students change dramatically. In this chapter and throughout this book, I detail the new learning roles and responsibilities that students face in a learner-centered classroom. I also describe specific ways that faculty can help students adjust to these new roles in which learning is more than listening to lectures, taking notes, and passing tests.

Teaching Is Difficult Work

I wish to begin by acknowledging a simple fact: teaching is difficult work. It is especially difficult for higher education faculty, because so few of us have had any formal development in teaching practice. However, it is difficult for all educators, regardless of experience or training, because we have little control over many of the very important aspects of students’ lives that significantly affect their learning. For example, teachers have little control over the academic backgrounds their students bring to their courses, including the depth and breadth of their knowledge of the subject area, their critical-thinking skills, their ability to transfer knowledge from one context to another, and their abilities to organize information and study effectively. Additionally, teachers have little control over the social and emotional factors that affect students’ learning, such as students’ interest in a subject, their motivation for learning, their life goals, their family life, their personal health, and their finances. If this were not enough, a college professor teaching a three-credit course has only 1.7% of his or her students’ time each week in which to teach them the History of Western Civilization or the Principles of Macro Economics. Teaching is not just challenging; it is difficult.

Here is another simple fact: teachers can positively impact students’ learning, and highly skilled teachers can impact students’ learning to even greater extents (Berry, 2005, p. 290). Despite all of the potential factors that, on any given day, can negatively affect students’ learning, teachers who know how to create community, engage students actively in their learning, make content challenging and interesting, teach students how to learn the content, give students choices about what and how they learn, and make the learning meaningful, do positively affect students’ learning. The methods and strategies we as teachers choose, our demonstrated passion for teaching, our skills in connecting with our students on a social and an emotional level, and our ability to teach students the learning skills they need to master the content, all of which come together to form the main focus of this book, have a direct and measurable effect on students’ learning. All teaching is not equal.

Optimizing Students’ Learning

Throughout this book I stress the need to create learning opportunities that optimize students’ learning. This is what effective teaching does; it creates the greatest opportunity for students to learn the skills and acquire the knowledge our college and university faculty have identified as most important for them to know.

How does one go about becoming a highly skilled teacher who optimizes students’ opportunities for learning? A good starting point is to heed Barr and Tagg’s (1995) main message in ‘‘From Teaching to Learning.’’ They state that teachers would be much more effective if, instead of focusing on their teaching, they focused on how and what their students are learning. In other words, we need to adopt a learner-centered approach to teaching.

Although you are probably well aware of the general concept of learnercentered teaching, let me clarify what I mean by offering this definition: Learner-centered teaching means subjecting every teaching activity (method, assignment, or assessment) to the test of a single question: ‘‘Given the context of my students, course, and classroom, will this teaching action optimize my students’ opportunity to learn?’’

Optimizing learning opportunities for 200 students is likely to be different from doing so for 20, so the context of the course plays a significant role in the actions a teacher can take. I choose the word opportunities because that is all any teacher can provide for his or her students. Great teachers maximize the opportunities for students to learn, but even the greatest teachers cannot guarantee learning. The final outcome of what is learned in any course will always be the students’ responsibility.

The aforementioned simple but powerful question asks us to rethink each and every aspect of our course planning and decision making to determine whether it will optimize our students’ learning opportunities. For example, if an instructor usually gives three exams and a cumulative final as the only measures for assigning grades, using that question, he or she might ask: Is the use of three exams and a final the best way to find out what my students have learned? Is it the optimal way for each student to show me what he or she knows? Are there better forms of evaluation that would promote students’ learning and give summative feedback? Do these exams promote long-term learning of this material? Each of these questions represents a slightly different aspect of optimizing students’ learning. All of them address the purpose of evaluations, focus on their effectiveness, and offer prompt thinking about the best way to do evaluation. The most important thing about these questions is that the act of reflecting on whether a given teaching action is the best way to optimize students’ learning is a starting point for improving the opportunity for learning. The reasons for using three exams and a final often have to do with convenience for the instructor, few complaints from students, and precedent. None of these reasons meets the challenge of optimizing students’ learning.

Teaching for Long-Term Learning

An equally important part of the question of whether an action optimizes students’ opportunities for learning is how we define the word learning. There is little disagreement today that a basic definition of learning is ‘‘a change in the neural networks in the brain’’ (Ratey, 2002). In his book, The Executive Brain, Goldberg (2002) gives a more technical explanation: ‘‘When the organism is exposed to a new pattern of signals from the outside world, the strengths of synaptic contacts (the ease of signal passage between neurons) and local biochemical and electric properties gradually change in complex distributed constellations. This represents learning, as we understand it today’’ (p. 29). Or for those of us who are not neuroscientists...