Teachers, what do you want your students to become? A person who is responsible for their things or the one who is habitual of spoon-feeding and works as told to?
Won’t you be happy to see your students turning into creative, interactive, initiating and active beings? Or does it keep you satisfied to just see your students listening? And well sadly you can’t be sure of that too!
‘With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility - Spiderman’
My motive behind quoting Spiderman or to be precise Uncle Ben here is tell you that if we will instill students with the feeling of responsibility towards their learning they might actually take it gracefully and can do wonders. But yes! A balance must be created. A fine line differentiates between being responsible from getting burdened.
Below are few pointers that you may find useful to allow your students to take ownership of their learning. Take a look!
-- Pin Drop Silence? NO MORE!
This much-loved statement will have to change. Make sure the students interact to express their views and their understanding of the subjects. Take a back seat and let your students come out. Observe their take on things and see them responding. Analyze arguments, do small debates in class to understand their understanding of subjects.
-- Be an Enquirer:
Ask questions to your students, explore their interest and help them try new things, experiment along with them, and solve the problems together. Diminish the fearful image students sometime carry of their teachers. Hold debates, class discussions or activities that demands 100% student participation. This is one of the best ways to initiate student centered learning. Activities like these also help students in confidence building.
-- Do your Students Feel Secure, Valued and Able to Take Risks?
Ask yourself this question. If the answer is yes, good! If not, change it to yes!
Students come out of their shell when they feel secured, valued and are aware they can take risk because their teacher will take care and guide them in the right direction. Motivate the students to try their hand at new things in new ways. Explore with them and appreciation always helps!
-- Question with a Scale:
Ask your student at what rank they see them on a scale from 1 – 10 and then ask them why they didn’t took a higher number. Discover where they are lacking, see them sharing their academic worries with you and help them overcome them.
-- Use Formative Peer Assessment
For certain assignments, ask students to assess each other’s work. Although the quality may not be equal to what a teacher can provide, peer assessment can give students more immediate and individualized attention. Encourage students to ask questions like how, when, why, where and what. This type of questioning will strengthen their understanding on the topic and peer collaboration.
-- Make Ways for Cooperative Learning:
Under this, students work in teams on problems and projects under conditions that assure both positive interdependence and individual accountability. For this, teachers can even dissect lesson plans divide student in groups and afterwards can hold a group discussion.
-- Adopt Technology: You will see magic happening in your classroom when you will start using technology in your classroom to aid your teaching ways. Kids will start enjoying as never before for one obvious reason. They love tech. kids engage to the utmost level in the techy stuff and teaching + learning gets better with the optimization of technology. You will be amazed to see students taking the lead of their work within no time.
-- Practice Inductive teaching and learning:
Present students with challenges (questions or problems) and make sure they already learned the course material in the context of addressing the challenges. Inductive methods include inquiry-based learning, case-based instruction, problem-based learning, project-based learning, discovery learning, and just-in-time teaching.
--Tell Your Expectations to your Students:
Motivate your students by expressing your expectation out of them. Encourage them to do better. Show them you know the potential they hold and guide them to discover it. Try to instill your students with self-confidence and faith.
-- List it:
Instruct the class to write down facts, information or words that they learnt newly and/or any queries that they may have. At the end of class, students are grouped and have to share what they have learnt and attempt to sort out their queries among themselves.
-- Learning by Doing not by Listening:
Students are always up for outdoor activities. A day in the laboratory or outdoors will open the door for active learning.
Student-centered methods have repeatedly been shown to be superior and more helpful to teachers as well as students in comparison to the traditional teacher-centered approach.
What’s your take on “Student Centered Learning”? I am sure there are more tips for us to know.
Share with us in the comment box below.
