Learner-Centered Teaching

Five Key Changes to Practice

Maryellen Weimer

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118416167
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

In this second edition of the classic work Learner-Centered Teaching, Maryellen Weimer—one of the nation's most highly regarded authorities on effective college teaching—offers a comprehensive introduction to the topic of learner-centered teaching in the college and university classroom. This thoroughly revised and updated edition includes the most current examples of practice in action from a variety of disciplines and contains new information on the research support for learner-centered approaches. Weimer also includes a more in-depth discussion of how students' developmental issues influence the effectiveness of learner-centered teaching.

Learner-centered teaching focuses attention on what the student is learning, how the student is learning, the conditions under which the student is learning, whether the student is retaining and applying the learning, and how current learning positions the student for future learning. To help educators accomplish the goals of learner-centered teaching, this important book presents the meaning, practice, and ramifications of the learner-centered approach and how this approach transforms the college classroom environment. Learner-Centered Teaching shows how to tie teaching and curriculum to the process and objectives of learning rather than to the content delivery alone.

The book also offers well-researched advice for educators who want to transition to a learner-centered approach in their classrooms and identifies the steps to take to put into place learner-centered policies and practices. Learner-Centered Teaching provides a theoretical foundation for the learner-centered approach and outlines a positive way to improve teaching.

PART ONE
FOUNDATIONS OF THE LEARNER-CENTERED APPROACH

CHAPTER ONE

LEARNER-CENTERED TEACHING: ROOTS AND ORIGINS

This chapter tells two stories. It recounts how I became a learner-centered teacher and it shares a bit of the origin and history of learner-centered ideas. The story of learner-centered teaching begins long before my efforts to focus on student learning. The approaches I started using rest on a collection of educational theories—some comparatively new; others established and venerable. These theories help explain why and how this way of teaching promotes learning. Knowing a bit about them makes it easier to decide whether this philosophy of teaching fits currently held beliefs or whether teaching using these approaches would represent a change in educational philosophy. The theoretical framework also offers criteria that can be used to assess the effectiveness of what has been implemented. Finally, knowing about the theories makes it easier to trace the origin of the various lines of research written about in Chapter Two.

The interplay between my story and these theories is interesting. I didn’t start out aspiring to become a learner-centered teacher. I didn’t even realize the changes I was implementing could be called that. Like many midcareer faculty, I was looking for new ideas—partly out of my need for growth and change, and partly because a lot of what I saw in classrooms seemed so ineffective. I opted for ideas I liked and ones that I thought I could make work. It took some time before I saw that the approaches I was using shared common elements, and it took even longer before I discovered that what I was doing rested on strong theoretical foundations. Once I discovered these things, I felt vindicated. What was happening in my classroom wasn’t some sort of fluke. Students were responding as they did for good reasons—but that’s not where my story begins.

The next section contains my story. It includes examples that illustrate learner-centered approaches, and they give an early sense of how learner-centered teaching might be defined. I also highlight each of the five areas in which I implemented changes. These areas are the subject of the five chapters in Part Two and are really the heart of my exploration of learner-centered teaching. Discussion of the theories follows my story, and examples are included in that discussion as well. They build some context around the theories and make it a bit easier to assemble a learner-centered framework out of the various theories.

A PERSONAL HISTORY

Like most important life lessons, what I have come to believe about learner-centered teaching grew out of a serendipitous confluence of events and experiences. The ones I consider most important are so overlapping and intertwined that a stream-of-consciousness recounting would more accurately describe how they occurred. However, in the interest of coherence, I will recount each of them separately.

EVENTS AND EXPERIENCES: WHAT MOTIVATED THE CHANGE

My transformation began in 1994, when, after a number of years working in faculty development, on educational research projects, and occasionally teaching upper-division and graduate courses, I returned to the classroom to teach entry-level, required courses. It was one of those midlife career moves motivated by the realization that the time for doing things no longer appeared limitless. As I took stock and tried to decide what I wanted to do with the rest of my career, it became clear that the most important and personally satisfying work I had done was in the classroom. I decided to return, finishing out my career as it had started, teaching undergraduates.

I went back wanting to teach differently, even though I wasn’t terribly clear in my thinking about what was wrong with how I taught or how I wanted change. I thought more about students and the fact that their lack of confidence prevented them from doing well in the basic communication courses I taught. They needed to find their way past self-doubt, awkwardness, and the fear of failure to a place where they could ask a question in class, make a contribution in a group, and speak coherently in front of peers. It came to me that I might address the problem by giving the students a greater sense of control. What if I presented them with some choices and let them make some of the decisions about their learning?

My first semester back in the classroom I decided to try this approach in my 8 a.m. section. I designed a beginning public speaking course that had only one required assignment: the dreaded speech. They had to give at least one. The rest of the syllabus presented them with a cafeteria of assignment options: a learning log; group projects of various sorts; credit for partic­ipation and the analysis of it; critiques of peers; conducting an interview, being interviewed, or both; and conventional multiple-choice exams. A version of this syllabus appears in Appendix One. As can be seen there, each assignment had a designated point value, and it was not a case of do-it-and-get-full-credit. Students could opt to complete as many or as few assignments as they wished, depending on the course grade they desired. Each assignment had a due date, and once the date passed, that assignment could not be turned in.

The first couple of days, students were totally confused. I remember a conversation with one about whether the exams were required. “They must be required. If the tests are optional, no one will take them.” “Sure they will. Students need points to pass the class.” “But what if I don’t take them?” “Fine—do other assignments and get your points that way.” “But what do I do on exam days?” “You sleep in!” Several students said they couldn’t decide which assignments they should do and asked me to make the choices for them. Even more wanted me to approve the collection of assignments they had selected.

Once the confusion passed, what happened the rest of the semester took me by surprise. I had no attendance policy, but I got better attendance than in any other class I could remember. More students (not all, but most) started to work hard early in the course, and some students determinedly announced that they would do every assignment if that was what it took to get enough points for an A. I was stunned by this change of attitude—students willing to work and without complaints? The high energy level and sense of optimism I usually saw in students those first few class days continued well into the course, and even as the stress of the semester started showing, this class was different. These students were more engaged. They routinely asked questions, sustained discussion longer and in the end disagreed with me and other students far more than I remembered other beginning students doing. No, it wasn’t instructional nirvana—there were still missed deadlines, shoddy work, and poor choices made about learning, but these things happened less often. I was definitely onto something and decided I would continue to experiment with the course.

About this time, I was asked to review a Brookfield (1995) manuscript under contract with Jossey-Bass and subsequently published as Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. I reference it in almost everything else I write. Few things I have read before or since have so dramatically influenced my pedagogical thinking. First off, I discovered how much about one’s own teaching could be learned through critical reflective practice. Brookfield describes methods that allow teachers to dissect instructional practices so that the assumptions on which they rest can be clearly seen. Since then I’ve learned much more from other adult educators who study, describe, and promote both this kind of critical reflection and the transformative learning it often produces (Mezirow and Associates, 2000; Cranton, 2006). Transformative learning is one of the theories I’ll be discussing subsequently in this book. But it was Brookfield who first enabled me to hold a mirror up to my teaching. The instructional image I saw was not what I expected. It was far less flattering.

I saw an authoritarian, controlling teacher who directed virtually everything that happened in the classroom. I made all the decisions and did so with little regard as to their impact on student learning and motivation. Almost totally focused on teaching, I had created a classroom environment that showcased my pedagogical prowess. Student learning just happened automatically, an outcome of my devotion to excellent teaching. It didn’t matter where I turned the mirror, I never saw anyone other than the teacher.

Before Brookfield, I fussed around with some interesting new strategies; after Brookfield, I tried to transform the teacher. Shaping up the course turned out to be a whole lot easier than “fixing” my very teacher-centered methods. Flachmann (1994) captures exactly how I felt then:

I’m a little embarrassed to tell you that I used to want credit for having all the intelligent insights in my classroom. I worked hard to learn these facts … I secretly wanted my students to look at me with reverence. I now believe that the opposite effect should occur—that the oracle, the locus and ownership of knowledge, should reside in each student and our principal goal as teachers must be to help our students discover the most important and enduring answers to life’s problems within themselves. Only then can they truly possess the knowledge that we are paid to teach them [p. 2].

Another wise teacher makes the point this way: “I’ve come to realize that it is not so much what students know but what they can do. Likewise, teaching is not about what I know but what I enable others to do” (Phelps, 2008, p. 2).

Another event during this period also strongly influenced my thinking. For years my husband, Michael, had wanted to build a wooden boat. He collected books, bought plans, subscribed to Wooden Boat magazine and faithfully watched Classic Boat on TV when it was on Speedvision. Then we bought a piece of property on an island. We planned to build a house there and needed a boat big enough to haul supplies to the site. Armed with a set of blueprints (selected after having reviewed hundreds), Michael started building the hull of a wooden boat. New words crept into his vocabulary. Over supper, he chatted on about battens, chines, sheer clamps, the kellson, and garboard. Next, the hull was covered with marine plywood, not something easily obtained in landlocked central Pennsylvania. The whole neighborhood showed up to help turn the hull. Then it was time to construct the floor, design the cabin, and rebuild the motor. Every step was accompanied with a whole new set of tasks to learn. During the evenings he watched videotapes demonstrating fiberglassing techniques. Every day some new marine supply catalog showed up in the mailbox.

After hours of work that extended across months, Noah’s Lark emerged, a twenty-four-foot, lobster-style wooden boat. She had a sleek white hull and dashing yellow stripe, a beautifully finished ash cabin, and she was powered by a fully rebuilt but not terribly fuel-efficient MerCruiser. She rode the water gracefully, rose to plane with style, and made her way through white caps and choppy water with steady certainty. She reliably towed barge loads of building supplies, always turning heads at the public launch. The bold asked, “Where did you get that boat?” “Built her,” my husband replied, unable to hide the pride in his voice.

It takes far more time and money to build a wooden boat than I imagined. Beyond those surprises, I marveled at the confidence my husband brought to the task. Where did it come from? On what was it based? He had never built a boat—houses, yes; furniture, yes; but not a boat. As the project progressed and charges on the credit card mounted, I felt it financially prudent to ask, pretty much on a monthly basis, “Do you know what you’re doing?” “Is this really going to be a boat we can use?” His answer was always the same, “No, I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m learning. Of course it will turn out. We need a boat, don’t we?”

There was an irony I didn’t miss—actually, it stuck in my craw. Michael is a college graduate. He acquired a degree in industrial engineering in his early thirties, and college was not the experience that had developed his confidence as a learner. In fact, quite the opposite had occurred. He graduated from college feeling that he just made it, keenly disappointed with what he had learned and stressed by the conditions under which he was expected to learn. He credits experiences with his father for developing his confidence. It irritated me that his college experience had undermined his beliefs about what he could do. College should be the time and the place for students to develop the learning skills on which that confidence rests.

While ruminating, I tried to imagine which of my students might tackle a complicated learning project about which they knew little. No one came to mind. I saw nothing in my students or myself, for that matter, that resembled the confidence and perseverance with which my husband confronted his need to learn how to build a wooden boat. That led me to think about what kind of classroom experiences would develop this self-confidence and these sophisticated learning skills. I couldn’t answer that question right off, but I did become persuaded that one of my tasks as a teacher was developing learning skills and the confidence to use them.

Setting that goal changed my thinking about many aspects of instruction. I began to see course content in a different light. It moved from being the end to being the means. It went from being something I covered to something I used to develop learning skills and an awareness of learning processes. I stopped assuming students were learning how to generate examples, ask questions, think critically, and perform a host of other skills by seeing me do them. If they were going to develop those skills, they needed to be the ones practicing them, not me. I saw evaluation as something more than the mechanism that generated grades. It became a potent venue for promoting learning and developing self- and peer-assessment skills.

As my teaching transformation continued moving in the learner-centered direction, I realized how little I actually knew about learning. Brookfield’s well-referenced book introduced me to all sorts of new sources. At the same time, interest in learning swept across higher education. For a while there, it almost felt as if learning had just been discovered—or maybe rediscovered. There were all sorts of things to read, and I read them in an unsystematic way, just allowing one source to lead to another. As I learned more about learning, I discovered that the new approaches I was adopting rested on a variety of educational theories, many supported by research.

ORGANIZING WHAT I LEARNED

I didn’t try to organize the hodgepodge of learner-centered strategies and approaches I was implementing until I started working on the first edition of this book. It was then I saw that those changes could be grouped around five key aspects of instructional practice. Those five areas have continued to structure my thinking about learner-centered teaching. In both the first edition and this one, there is one chapter about each area. I consider those five chapters the heart of my work on learner-centered teaching.

Since they are so central, these aspects of instruction merit an introduction now. I start with how learner-centered teaching changes the role of the teacher. I didn’t start with this chapter in the first edition, but I do in this edition for two reasons. It’s a good place to start because it makes sense to faculty. Teaching that promotes learning is not teaching that endlessly tells students what they should do and what they should know. Rather, it promotes learning by facilitating the acquisition of knowledge. The hard and messy work of learning can be done only by students. And I start here because changing the role of the teacher is central and significant. I’m not sure that it’s the first thing that needs to change. But the other changes cannot be executed if the role of the teacher stays the same. It’s significant because although this change may be easy to accept intellectually, most of us have discovered practicing facilitation in the classroom is anything but simple. It presents teachers with an ongoing set of challenges.

Changing the balance of power in the classroom requires a bigger conceptual stretch. Teacher authority is assumed—taken for granted so often that most teachers have lost their awareness of it. Whether they realize it or not, teachers exert enormous control over the learning processes of students. They decide what students will learn and how they will learn it. They set the pace and establish the conditions under which the learning will take place. They regulate the flow of communication in the classroom, and finally they certify whether and how well students have learned. What does that leave for students to decide? Ironically, what’s left is the most important decision of all: students decide whether or not they will learn. But even though teachers can’t guarantee learning outcomes, they can positively influence students’ motivation to learn when they give students some control over the learning process. The challenge for learner-centered teachers is finding those strategies that give students control and responsibility commensurate with their ability to handle it. The goal of learner-centered teaching is the development of students as autonomous, self-directed, and self-regulating learners.

The function of content stands as the strongest barrier to changes that make teaching more learner-centered. Teachers have lots of content to cover, and when students are working with new and unfamiliar content, they don’t cover it as efficiently as faculty. Learner-centered courses still contain plenty of content, but teachers use the content instead of covering it. They use it as they always have—to develop a knowledge base—but they also use content to develop the learning skills students will need across a lifetime of learning. Equipping students with learning skills makes it possible for them to learn content themselves—sometimes within the course itself and regularly after it.

Learner-centered teachers institute changes that make students more responsible for learning. They work to create and maintain climates that are conducive to learning, whether students meet in classrooms or onlin...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• THE AUTHOR
• PART ONE: FOUNDATIONS OF THE LEARNER-CENTERED APPROACH
• PART TWO: THE FIVE KEY CHANGES TO PRACTICE
• PART THREE: IMPLEMENTING THE LEARNER-CENTERED APPROACH
• APPENDIX ONE: SYLLABUS AND LEARNING LOG ENTRIES FOR SPEECH COMMUNICATIONS 100A
• APPENDIX TWO: RESOURCES THAT DEVELOP LEARNING SKILLS
• REFERENCES
• NAME INDEX
• SUBJECT INDEX