Teacher Centered vs. Student Centered Learning......

The teacher stands in front of students, writes on the board her objectives and then immediately starts discussing and talking about the first content objective they’ll be learning. Students watch, listen, making mental notes of what they see and hear. This type of learning is considered teacher centered or direct instruction, where the teacher delivers the content to her students and students learn from the teacher. Typically, the teacher should be implementing different ways the students can learn, whether it be with pictures, manipulatives, videos, and or materials.  Learners are mostly alone (sometimes they work collaboratively) when learning the material. Most of today’s teachers and classrooms are teacher centered and this is how our students learn the content they need to learn from our standards. Then students use different forms of assessment to assure their students are meeting the objective and goals needed to

However, more and more schools are noticing and implementing different student learning strategies into their classrooms.  Students centered learning takes more of a social approach into learning (talking to others using collaboration, groups, student lead thinking) and lets them take the paths into the direction they want to maneuver to learn whatever objective is for the moment. Instead of using handouts, or lessons on the board, student centered learning calls for of authentic/task based oriented learning where students learn through projects, group work, plays, etc. In this type of environment, the teacher is still present, but acts as a facilitator to assist students in achieving the goals. Student centered learning improves students’ critical and problem-solving skills.

When teaching our students in an e-learning environment, in my opinion I feel when we should use teacher centered instruction when we first learn a program, software, app, etc. Teachers should direct students in what they are using, what they should be doing, and what goal(s) they are to accomplish.  For student centered learning, students are working together or independently to learn from the apps and software and guiding their own thinking. This is where the teacher acts as a facilitator to assure the students are using the e-learning apps/software appropriately and are in the right direction. At the end, a teacher direct approach would take place where the teacher assesses his/her students to assure they’ve met the goal(s).