3 Ways to Create a Student-Centered Classroom
The importance of prioritizing individual student needs, listening to student voices, and empowering them to make choices about their learning is certainly not new — talented educators have been striving to create student-centered classrooms for a long time by fostering a unique ecosystem that relies on balance, creativity, and trust. While strategies to create student-centered classrooms will vary across environments and evolve with time, here are a few of our favorite ways educators put students at the center of instruction:
Prioritize Student Agency
This is perhaps the most intuitive strategy in the list — “student-centered learning” and “student agency” are intrinsically linked. Here’s how ISTE defines student-centered learning:
“Student-centered learning moves students from passive receivers of information to active participants in their own discovery process. What students learn, how they learn it and how their learning is assessed are all driven by each individual student’s needs and abilities.” [1]
Student agency frames the above-mentioned shift in student roles in terms of responsibility and empowerment.
Rocky Bragg, a High School teacher from California, recommends that educators who want to boost student agency consider the power dynamics of their classrooms. In his blog, Student Agency: Teaching Students to Take Ownership of their Learning, he writes:
“Student agency in implementation means equipping students with the cultural, navigational and social capital necessary for them to create, define, and structure what their learning looks like.”
In Rocky’s student-centered classroom, students have agency in lesson planning, facilitating readings and discussions, and even how they want to demonstrate mastery.
Jason Blair, an art teacher in Columbus, Ohio, creates a student-centered art classroom through agency by empowering students to exercise self-expression and empathy. In his blog, Empowering Student Agency Through Art, he writes:
“Letting students know what they think, feel, and care about is important, and is a powerful condition to cultivate student agency. Students need to feel heard, before they will speak up.”
In Jason’s student-centered classroom, learners explore agency as a concept that applies to their relationship with themselves, others, and the world through art projects. Jason strengthens students’ agency within these projects by allowing them to make decisions throughout the process, such as how to research, what medium to use, or if they would rather work at home or remotely.
Use Technology to Personalize Instruction
Student-centered classrooms also address individual needs with personalized instruction.
To better understand what this means in action, let’s define personalized learning:
If we understand personalized learning as a collaboration where both teacher and learner set goals and choose learning experiences to optimize the learner’s success, then it becomes clear that the overlap between student agency and personalized learning is quite natural. (Remember Rocky Bragg’s student-centered high school classroom, where he was setting goals and choosing activities with his students in order to promote student agency!)
However, what is intuitively related in theory and even in practice isn’t always easy to execute at scale. That’s why powerful technology is critical in using personalized learning to create a student-centered classroom.
Adaptive learning technology identifies individual learning gaps and delivers instruction to address those gaps in a unique learning sequence and pace for each student. It’s an invaluable tool to ensure that every moment spent in the classroom is as student-centered as possible, while still addressing growth and mastery. Rise, a 3–8 Mathematics and ELA program and ALEKS, a Math and Chemistry program, are two powerful examples of adaptive technology that personalizes instruction according to student needs.
For more on personalized learning, its ties to agency and student-centered classrooms, and the role technology plays in personalization, see:
Consider Community, Experience, and Culture
Student-centered classrooms attend to far more than academic learning — they care for social and emotional learning, implement culturally responsive teaching, and seek to better understand how other factors shape each student’s experience — such as family, community, and even trauma.
Leveraging this nuanced and multi-faceted approach to creating a student-centered classroom can take many forms, depending on your students’ needs and where your school currently resides in their journey with SEL, culturally responsive teaching, and family engagement.
For example, CASEL provides extensive information on student-centered discipline, which prioritizes student empowerment in emotion regulation and problem solving [2]. Edutopia cites ownership of learning as a critical component of culturally responsive teaching, and suggests giving students the opportunity to set their own classroom guidelines for respect [3].
Educator Errica Dotson-Hooper views trusting relationships between teachers, students, and families as a revolutionary way to move instruction away from a “sit and get”, and toward a modern method that promotes critical thinking. In her blog, The Missing Piece: Trust Between Student, Family, and Teacher, she writes:
“Once people know that they are genuinely cared for, they are more likely to open up and allow themselves to be coached, developed and taught….Students don’t trust that teachers care about them and can relate to their struggles. Families don’t trust schools to partner with them to be an agent of change in their homes and community.”
Errica suggests district leaders create student-centered learning environments by encouraging staff to volunteer within the community and building partnerships with local churches and businesses.
Strategies to create a student-centered classroom continue to evolve as powerful education technology becomes more prevalent and assessment data quality improves, as we learn more about the science of learning, and as we better understand how factors such as social and emotional development, culture, and community impact individual and collective classroom experiences.
References
[1] International Society for Technology in Education. (n.d.). Student-centered learning. ISTE. https://www.iste.org/standards/essential-conditions/student-centered-learning.
[2] Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. (n.d.). Student-Centered Discipline. Casel Guide to Schoolwide SEL. https://schoolguide.casel.org/focus-area-3/classroom/a-supportive-classroom-environment/student-centered-discipline/.
[3] Rucker, N. W. (2019, December 10). Getting Started With Culturally Responsive Teaching. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/article/getting-started-culturally-responsive-teaching.
