Are We Spoon-Feeding Students?
I believe in learner-centered teaching, but my belief has been shaken a bit lately.
Let me explain.
Learner-centered teaching is a jargony term for a pretty basic idea: that the point of education is learning, not teaching and that teachers should teach with the learner, and not just the content, in mind.
Learner-centered teaching is a philosophy, not a technique, and includes a wide range of methods, as all good teaching should. For the most part, these methods draw on the science of learning and involve active engagement: using problem solving, discussion, debate, labs, case studies, etc., to get students to think about and apply — and not just memorize — the material. Learner-centered teachers provide regular feedback, try to make assessment frequent and authentic, and consider social and emotional, not just cognitive, dimensions of learning. As one faculty member I spoke with put it, learner-centered models put more responsibility on the instructor to teach well, as opposed to traditional models, where the onus is on students to figure it out.
Who wouldn’t like that, right?
Well, some faculty members I’ve worked with haven’t. They’ve chafed at the idea of learner-centered teaching, saying that it smacks of “spoon-feeding” to think so much about student sensibilities or strive so hard for clarity and transparency. And I’ve disagreed strenuously. In my experience, when a course or assignment is well designed and the performance criteria are clear, you can demand much, much more of students than when the course is poorly designed or the criteria are vague. You feel far more justified in setting the bar high, and you tend to get better work out of students.
But on another level, those faculty members who worry about spoon-feeding may have a point. It isn’t that learner-centered teachers don’t have high standards for students. I’d argue that their standards are often higher. It’s that by having higher standards for themselves, they may be depriving students of the opportunity to acquire important skills and knowledge that are not part of the formal curriculum.
Here’s what I mean.
Students don’t come to schools and universities just to learn content. If they did, learner-centered teaching techniques would definitely be the right approach. There’s plenty of research to back this up. But students don’t just need to learn content; they also need to learn how to negotiate the real world. And the real world is not designed with them in mind. It’s byzantine. It’s arbitrary. It’s illogical. Bureaucracies and systems are frequently neither clear nor reasonable.
Is it possible, I wonder, that older, teacher-centered forms of teaching helped students develop hidden skills, such as learning to deal with opacity, to intuit the intentions and agendas of authorities, to pay attention even when the information isn’t inherently riveting (many a college lecture come to mind), to chart a path in the absence of adequate guidance, and to learn independently content that was not explained clearly, if at all? Could it be that these apparent obstacles to learning actually helped students learn other important life skills?
This idea dovetails in some ways with the emerging research on grit. Social psychologists and educational researchers are increasingly pointing out the benefits to students of struggling, even failing: experiences that teach students resilience. Bjork’s work on “desirable difficulties”, moreover, explores how impediments to learning — for example, assignments with unclear directions and fonts that are difficult to read — can actually help students learn. How? By making them process the material more actively and deeply: cognitive processes that contribute to long-term retention. Interesting, right? By making learning harder, you might actually facilitate learning!
The question I’ve been playing with is related, but slightly different: By making it easier for students to learn the content, are we denying students the opportunity to acquire knowledge and skills they’ll need to navigate the real world? In the interests of improving learning in some areas, are we also subtly undermining it in others? Are we, in fact, spoon-feeding?
Don’t get me wrong; I still believe in learner-centered teaching. If nothing else, sky-high college tuition entitles students to teaching that is clear, organized, fair, and engaging. That having been said, I’d love more conversation about building desirable difficulties into learner-centered teaching, along with opportunities for students to practice moving through a less-than-learner-centered world.
Dr. Marie Norman is the Senior Director of Educational Excellence at Acatar. Norman has taught anthropology for over 20 years and worked in faculty development for 10 years. She is the co-author of the book How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching.
