LEARNER - CENTERED

     Nowadays, we hear considerably about student- centered teaching that is widespread and gets attached to teaching strategies, teachers, classes, programs, departments and institutions. This technique used in classrooms increase the self-awareness, responsibilities, and self- confidence of the students, and increases their motivation to learn better. In this way we get rid of the traditional lecturing method.  In this context we should note some characteristics of teaching that make it student-centered.

   First of all, we know that teachers work hard to make learning tasks to students, asking questions, and getting answers, then adding details to these answers, they offer examples, and they organize the content, so the teacher works much harder than the students.  I don’t think students develop sophisticated learning skills without the chance to practice and in most classrooms the teacher gets far more practice than the students. So learner-centered teaching should engage students in the hard, messy work of learning.

   To add, learner-centered teachers teach students how to think, solve problems, evaluate evidence, analyze arguments, generate hypotheses, all those learning skills are essential to mastering material. These learning skills develop faster if they are taught explicitly along with the content.

   Moreover, learner-centered teachers should include assignment components in which students reflect, analyze and critique what they are learning and how they are learning it. The goal is to make students aware of themselves as learners and to make learning skills something students want to develop.

   Furthermore, when teachers make all the decisions, the motivation to learn decreases and learners become dependent. Actually we can give students some choice about which assignments they complete. Discussing some policies, setting assignment deadlines within a given time window. And even more we might ask students to help create assessment criteria. In other words, using this strategy give students more chance to develop some control over learning processes.

   Finally, teachers are aware that students learn more from and with each other, so they should encourage the collaboration, and the communicative interaction among the students, use face to face interaction, or even more engage students with online interaction, and so forth… In this way they communicate with other cultures, therefore they enhance their writing, and speaking skills, as well as increasing their educational experiences.