Marcos

Certified Tutor

Student-centered teaching is the classic model of teaching, established and accepted without question by teachers, students and parents and by society in general, is the one in which the teacher teaches, basically and fundamentally speaking, telling the students what they are supposed to know.

Teaching by narrative or lecturing is another way to call this classic model of teaching. In this model of teaching, students copy everything they can, from the board, from the professor lecture to study later. The model remains the same if the teacher uses PowerPoint presentations in their exposures and lets students copy the electronic files to their pen drives. Even so, they will have to memorize information to reproduce them in the exams.

Regardless of testing, how much of what has been learned in good narrative lessons will remain after a few months, a few years? Is it really an effective teaching and learning mechanism? It is enough to reflect on what remains of the knowledge learned in school to conclude that the narrative is ineffective. Some of the subjects we attended at school seem to have never existed. There is nothing left. Others, like chemistry, for example, people have even a certain pleasure in saying that they know nothing. Why not then shut your mouth and let the student talk?

Student-centered teaching, having the teacher as mediator, is teaching in which the student talks a lot and the teacher speaks little. Leaving students to speak implies using strategies, in which they can discuss, negotiate meanings among themselves, present orally to the large group the product of their collaborative activities, receive and criticize. The student must be active, not passive. She or he has to learn to interpret, to negotiate meanings; have to learn to be critical and accept criticism. Receiving the narrative of the "good teacher" uncritically does not lead to meaningful critical learning, to relevant, long-lasting learning; it does not lead to learning to learn.

Focusing the teaching or, rather, the learning on the student does not necessarily mean releasing control, but rather organizing it to take into account that the student is responsible for his own learning, that he is master of that learning. The human being learns meaningfully if he has adequate prior knowledge and if he wants to learn.

As it has been said, student-centered teaching should not, be interpreted as one in which the student has complete freedom to choose what he wants to learn. Students need to be given options, content to be worked through in situations that make sense to students that are relevant to them. It is always they who decide whether they want to learn some knowledge in a meaningful way.

My classes are organized in order to provide situations that the students must solve collaboratively, in small groups. It may be a project, a classic problem, an open problem, a conceptual map on a particular topic, a V diagram on a research article, a laboratory practice, a critical analysis of a literary text, a dramatization. The possibilities are many, the important thing is that in these activities students collaborate, discuss, disagree, seek consensus. All this contributes to the capture of meanings, so that the student feels that teaching is centered on him, that the focus of teaching is his learning.