Student-centered instructional methods are those methods that allow students to be highly engaged in learning. There are various types of engagement including cognitive engagement, behavioral engagement, and emotional engagement (Cents-Boonstra et al., 2020). One of the ways to ensure student engagement is by providing choice for students (Cents-Boonstra et al., 2020).
Additionally, teachers can incorporate the following strategies to make their classrooms more student-centered:
Active Learning
Collaboration
Differentiation
Social-Emotional Learning,
Technology Integration (Lisciandrello, n. d.).
The following chart shows student-centered learning strategies and how they fit into a standards-driven learning environment.
Note: From "Standards-Driven Learning and the Student-Centered Learning Environment,” by S. Martin, 2021, p. 3.
Student-centered learning may look chaotic in a classroom. To those people who remember the "old-school" style of student in desks in rows facing the chalkboard, today's student-centered learning may be seem disorganized and without structure. On the surface, while it does appear unstructured, there is often much more planning that goes into this kind of teaching than traditional teaching. The result is students who are much more engaged, resulting in elevated student learning.
References
Cents-Boonstra, M., Lichtwarck-Aschoff, A., Denessen, E., Aelterman, N., & Haerens, L.
(2020). Fostering student engagement with motivating teaching: an observation study
of teacher and student behaviours. Research Papers in Education, 36(6).
Inclusive Education Planning. (2019, June 3). Universal Design for Learning and differentiation
Istas, B. (2017, November 18). STEM, STEAM, and inquiry: What’s in it for me? Learner’s
Edge.
Learning by Inquiry. (n. d.). What the heck is the difference between IBL and PBL?
The Learning Innovation Lab. (n. d.). PBL supports Universal Design for Learning.
Usher, K. (2019, April 10). Differentiating by offering choices. Edutopia.
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