More Evidence of the Trouble with ‘Student-Centered’ Teaching
I’ve long had many related-but-separate complaints about ‘student-centered’ teaching practices. A new study in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis lends new evidence to several of them. (You can also check out good write-ups from Sarah Sparks andBettina Chang.)The authors used data on a large number of first grade students to see what strategies their teachers used to teach them math. They then looked to see whether teachers tended to use different strategies when students had stronger or weaker math skills, and then grouped these strategies together based on whether they would normally be considered ‘teacher-directed’ or ‘student-centered’.
Their methods – including an elaborate set of statistical controls for variables like student SES and prior achievement – also allowed them to make tentative causal inferences about which teaching strategies seem to be more effective for students who were stronger or weaker in math to begin with.
The results are mostly unflattering to student-centered approaches.
Student-centered Teaching Can be a Pedagogy of Privilege.
A couple of years ago I claimed that teaching methods typically considered ‘student-centered’ together represent a ‘pedagogy of privilege‘; such methods might be good – or at least good enough – for relatively strong students, but they More Evidence of the Trouble with ‘Student-Centered’ Teaching | Paul Bruno: