Learner Centered Teaching (LCT) has become a popular phrase among educators

nowadays. It has been named in several ways such as student-centred approach or

learner-centered pedagogy in many textbooks and journal articles. Looking at the
research literature surrounding learner-centred teaching in the past 20 years, a book
published in 2002 by Maryllen Weimer stands as one of the earlier attempts to
comprehensively discuss and define what is LCT about.

In Weimer’s book titled, ‘Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to

Practice’, five key changes were significantly taking place in schools. Each of the
features will be discussed briefly below and are presented in Figure 1.

Balance of Power

Responsibility of Evaluation
Learner 5 Purpose &
Features Process

Function of Role of Teacher

Content

Figure 1
Five Key Changes in Learner Centered Teaching Practices

Balance of Power

 In a traditional classroom, the power to decide what

lessons to discuss, what learning activities
students must engage in, and what assessment
tasks to give mainly belongs to the teacher with
little input from students. On the other hand, in a
student-centered classroom, a teacher shares that
power by consulting learners prior to making final
decisions.

 The traditional exercise of power in the classroom often benefits the teacher
more than it promotes student learning. The uniform instructional approach or
‘one-size-fits-all’ concept certainly is more convenient on the part of the teacher
 who has worked hard in planning, implementing, and assessing outcomes of
learning. However, this uniform approach has been criticized by scholars by
being unresponsive to the diversity of needs, interests, and readiness among
students.

 In order to balance power in the classroom, learners are frequently consulted and
given immediate and ongoing feedback by the teacher. The teacher empowers
students by giving them the opportunity to choose and make decisions like
selecting among lesson topics, choose learning activities, determine pace of
learning, and select an assessment task to demonstrate one’s mastery of targeted
learning competencies.

Function of Content

 Current research evidence from educational

psychology calls for a change in the function of
curriculum content which should be less on
covering it and more on using content to develop a
learner’s individual way of
understanding or sense-making. Teachers
need to allow learners to raise their own questions,
generate their own answers or solutions.

 From a constructivist perspective, knowledge cannot simply be given to students:

Students must construct their own meanings” (Stage, Muller, Kinzie, and
Simmons, 1998, p. 35). In other words, learners are capable of constructing and
reconstructing their knowledge through active personal effort. This view debunks
the current belief about students’ learning from passively receiving information
transmitted from teachers via lectures.

 In order to facilitate learning that changes how students think and understand,
teachers must begin by finding out students’ prior knowledge or conceptions and
then design learning activities that will change these pre-instructional concepts.

 Learner-centered teaching also regards content as more of competency-based

learning in which students master targeted skills and content before progressing
to another lesson. The more important practice here is to accommodate students’
differing pace of learning. For instance, some students may be able to
demonstrate they know how to use a microscope in 1 hour while others need 2
hours of practice to demonstrate proficiency in manipulating it.

 With patient guidance and ongoing support from teachers, competency-based

learning would ensure that students advance to new material when they are
ready, at their own pace, whether they can move quickly or whether they need
more time.
Role of the Teacher

 Constructivism theory brings the role of the teacher as

that of a facilitator of learning, not as the fountain of
learning. He/she instead encourages students to
explore multiple knowledge sources, make sense of it,
and personally organize the information taken from
different sources.

 As generally observed, less knowledgeable and experienced learners will interact

with content in less intellectually robust ways, but the goal is to involve students
in the process of acquiring and retaining information.

 This shifting view on the role of the teacher deemphasizes the focus on teaching
techniques and methods if they are considered separate from the subject matter
and learning structures of the discipline.

 Teachers no longer function as exclusive content expert or authoritarian

classroom managers and no long work to improve teaching by developing
sophisticated presentation skills.

 Greater involvement with students by the teacher is central to student motivation.

Diekelmann et al (2004) show how a nursing teacher increasingly included
students in ‘cocreating compelling courses’ and was surprised ‘by the insights
students shared regarding how to create compelling courses and their willingness
to collaborate with …[her] to improve teaching and learning experiences’
(Diekelmann et al, 2004, p.247).

 Maclellan finds that ‘the teacher is involved in clarifying the subject matter,
offering examples, or suggesting arguments for or against a point of view may
minimize the students’ need to think’ while, equally, ‘little engagement by the
tutor, leaving students to determine both what and how to learn without any
criteria to judge their process, is unsatisfactory, inefficient and makes a nonsense
of formal, higher education as a planned and designed system (Maclellan, 2008,
p.418).

 Teachers must become comfortable with changing their leadership style from
directive to consultative-- from "Do as I say" to "Based on
your needs, let's co-develop and implement a plan of
action.

Responsibility for Learning

 In recent years, work on self-regulated learning has advanced, and the goal of
21st century education ought to be the creation of independent, autonomous
learners who assume responsibility for their own learning.

 Adults are known to be capable of self-directed learning and that continuous

learning occurs across their career span and lifetime.

 Each student may require different ways of learning, researching and analysing
the information available.

 It establishes that students can and should be made responsible for their own
learning.

 Learning skills of autonomous self-regulating learners can be learned and must

be taught even at an early age. This is even more important when entering higher
education.

 The learning skills acquired in basic education and higher education will be used
throughout the course of their professional and personal lives.

 Learning is cooperative, collaborative, and community-oriented.

 Students are encouraged to direct their own learning and to work with other
students on research projects and assignments that are both culturally and
socially relevant to them.

 Class often starts with a mini-lesson, which then flows into students making
choices about what they need to do next to meet specific learning targets aligned
to the standards.

Evaluation Purpose and Process

 The literature on self-directed learning also underscores

the importance of assessment, only in this case it is the
ability of students to self-assess accurately. Sophisticated
learners know when they do or do not understand
something.

 They can review a performance and identify what needs

improvement.

 They have mechanisms for its collections and methods for evaluating it and
acting on it.
Four Principles of Student-centered Approach

A more recent research on the student-centered approach was reported by Kaput in

2018 that was funded by the Nellie Mae Education Foundation and UMass Donahue
Institute. This study surveyed 12 public high schools in New England in terms of
how they apply learner-centered teaching in their classroom practices. The said
survey summarized their findings in to 4 tenet which are:

Learning is Students engage in different ways and in

Personalized different places.

Learning is Students move ahead when they have

competency- demonstrated mastery of content, not when
based they’ve reached a certain birthday or
endured the required hours in a classroom.

Learning Learning takes place beyond the traditional

happens anytime, school day, and even the school year.
anywhere Learning is also not restricted to the
classroom.

Students take Students are engaged in their own success,

ownership of as well as incorporate their interests and
their learning skills into the learning process.

Kaput’s study reported that the majority of the participating schools were effective in
personalizing the learning of their students and creating an environment where
students took ownership of their learning. However, the study also found that the
participating schools struggled with implementing and practicing “anytime, anywhere
learning” due to a series of challenges that both teachers and administrators faced.
Teachers from the participating schools largely responded that student-centered
learning promoted higher student engagement and facilitated learning that was more
relevant to students. Further, a large percentage of the teachers contended that
students in student-centered environments explored the curriculum with more depth
and retained knowledge more effectively than in traditional settings.

Top 20 Principles for PreK–12 Teaching and Learning

The American Psychological Association (APA) published in 2015 its top 20

principles for teaching and learning for basic education teachers. These principles
were based on decades of research on human learning and can well serve as
lampposts for today’s teachers on how to facilitate learner-centered teaching. A brief
statement of APA on the implications of the top 20 principles to current teaching
practices is quoted below:
 “Psychological science has much to
contribute to enhancing teaching and
learning in the classroom. Teaching and
learning are intricately linked to social and
behavioral factors of human
development, including cognition,
motivation, social interaction, and
communication” (APA,
2015, p.8)

As a future educator, the top 20 principles revolve around the following key concepts
to keep in mind whenever we design our instructional plans and implement them with
our students.

Prior Knowledge Self-Regulation Formative

Assessment

Learner’s Belief on Mastery Goals Summative

Intelligence Assessment

Creativity Interpersonal Measuring with

Relationships Standards

Teacher Social Interaction Fair Interpretation

Expectations

Long Term Emotional Feedback

Knowledge Wellbeing

Contextual Learning Positive Student Support

Relationships
Student Support Practice

You may now turn to Appendix C for a more thorough discussion of the
Top 20 principles from APA.