This past summer I read
Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to
Practice by Maryellen Weimer and highly recommend it. It provides
research evidence for the efficacy of learner-centered teaching and then
provides concrete advice and examples about how to change our teaching
to become more learner-centered:
- we need to understand our role as
educators to be facilitators of learning rather than dispensers of
knowledge,
- we must share power with students inside of our classrooms
giving students opportunities to voice how and what they learn but to
not abandon our educational responsibility,
- we must re-conceptualize
the role of the content in our courses as a vehicle for developing
learning skills in our students,
- students must be made responsible
for their own learning, and
- students need to become involved in the
assessment process.
The book ends with advice about how to deal with
student and faculty resistance to implementing learner-centered teaching
and suggests that it is best to consider the developmental stage of
students and faculty to determine the degree and type of
learner-centered activities used in our courses. And if a convert to
learner-centered teaching practices, to implement change incrementally
and not whole-scale. Otherwise we, as instructors, and our students risk
burnout.
I greatly enjoyed this book. The Jossey-Bass URL is:
http://ca.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118119282,miniSiteCd-JBHIGHERED.html
