Urgings and Cautions in Student-Centered Teaching

Its Exemplary Teacher's Forum in hiatus, AAHE's National Conference in Chicago in March seemed a quiet affair when it came to talk of teaching and learning. But there was a strong harmony and much good sense in the offerings of the few speakers addressing these topics. The strongest thread wove its way about the theme of student-centered and active learning. The strength of the thread was experience, not theory. Its lessons mixed the familiar with the new. Among the familiar rose the importance of forethought; among the new, the importance of letting go.

In a session called "Creative Pedagogy: A Spectrum of Strategies to Enhance Community Through Active Learning," three speakers reflected on their experiences with service learning, experiential learning, and simulations. In a way, the session almost took a sonata-allegro form with the first speaker laying out themes developed more fully by the second, themes recapitulated by the final speaker but with a coda-like twist that pointed toward the promise that might lie in further exploration.

A Service Learning Parable

Rick Battistoni, director of the Feinstein Institute for Public Service at Providence College, began the session with a kind of parable. He briefly told the story of a group of students recently involved in a service learning project in which they would assist residents of a low-income housing project in running a day school for children. The students found problems at the site and weren't content merely to serve out their time there without trying to respond to what they found. Guided by faculty, they reported their experience to the class to which the service work was connected, and it became grist for a problem-solving situation. Class discussions led to a meeting between students and their site supervisors, and in that dialogue students learned that their perceptions of the situation included many unsupported presumptions. But the students also made some good points that impressed the staff, leading to improvements at the site. "The point," said Battistoni, "is the classroom and the pedagogy we were using enhanced the community of the class because everybody was working to help this one group work on their problem. What [the students] learned about community, about working with people from different backgrounds, a whole host of things that we wanted students to get at, came through not only in the classroom discussions, but in structured writing assignments and the like.

"Service alone I don't think necessarily can cause people to learn anything," he concluded. One hears "the power of the group" championed widely, but the discipline of clear goals, the wisdom of forethought, and the importance of a flexible and dynamic pedagogy remain essential in harnessing that power, Battistoni maintained.

Planning, Authority, and Group Dynamics in Active Learning

Zelda Gamson, now professor of education and director of the New England Research Center for Higher Education at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, expanded on Battistoni's parable. "I've always thought of people doing service learning and experiential learning as first cousins," she said. "The general rubric is active learning."

All but three of the "Seven Principles of Good Practice" in college teaching that Gamson articulated several years ago with Arthur Chickering emphasize active or collaborative learning, she pointed out. "The evidence is very strong that these social forms of learning are very effective in increasing retention (administrators love to hear this; the evidence is very good for that), encouraging much more complex thinking about complex issues than we have come to expect from our students, and encouraging acceptance of different ways of learning on the part of students and faculty. The motivation for learning goes up [when these approaches are used] as does the sense of connection among students, even (perhaps especially) when they are quite different in terms of background."

Gamson, too, stressed that "these kinds of approaches don't happen automatically; in fact, they need to be very carefully designed. It isn't just a matter of getting people together and having them discuss," she said. "It seems to me that the active creation of social community is a precondition for the intellectual impacts of these methods. Unless students are encouraged to learn how to work together, some students' interpersonal difficulties may get in the way, such as issues of dominance in the group, issues that will always come up."

If the power of the group has much to offer teaching and learning, participants need some orientation to the predictable dynamics of groups. "Students need to learn norms of conducting themselves effectively in groups," Gamson insisted, "[norms] such as clearly defining what they are to do, selecting a coordinator or chair if they are engaged in a problem-solving situation, deciding on the way they will use their time to accomplish their purposes, giving everyone a chance to contribute, rotating roles such as spokesperson, recorder, and so on. "All of these are basic group dynamic skills that I have to say most of us do not have, and so the first step is learning how to do these things ourselves."

The rub, the real challenge to faculty in using groups, Gamson made clear, lies less in these basics that forethought can handle than in what she sees as the necessary challenge to traditional ideas of authority in knowledge that arise when these methods begin to take hold.

After briefly describing the epistemological differences between cooperative and collaborative learning (cf. Horace Rockwood's articles in The National Teaching and Learning Forum vol. 4, no. 6 and vol. 5, no. 1), Gamson recalled her participation in a student-faculty research community at Ann Arbor in which the two groups worked together to define and carry out a piece of original research. As a faculty leader in this context she said, "If I ever tried to assert my authority, I'd get shot down by the students who'd tell me: 'You're here to help us define a research problem, and if you tell us too much, we're not going to learn this, and so, you know, shut up.' There were several confrontations like this; so the issue of authority came up." Gamson came to see such confrontations as necessary in some sense: "When students define the problem, it's a kind of collaborative learning in which authority does become an issue. And students . . . are not well served by pedagogies that [say] 'I'm going to tell you the story and what the truth is here.' Collaboration works best when there's a confrontation with the real world. That's really where the challenge lies in terms of coming to terms with realities that are messier than our classrooms normally allow students to confront."

Games, Simulations and the Risks of Learning

Cheryl Keen, dean of the faculty at Antioch College, picked up where Gamson and Battisoni left off in proposing the value of simulation games in teaching. The research on whether simulations promote learning, she acknowledged, remains divided. Once again forethought seemed the deciding factor: "It depends on whether you're savvy about why you are doing it," said Keen, "and if you take the time to work up to it and to debrief. The rule is to spend at least as much time debriefing as you spend playing the game; otherwise, what did you do it for?"

Adding to the ideas of authority Gamson brought up, Keen reported that among her most powerful experiences using simulations had been where she'd been able to have students write the game themselves. In this, she said, they come to like "critical systemic thinking." Simulations, Keen suggested, remain an open door, a largely unexplored territory with a high degree of perceived risk. As with service work and other kinds of active learning, simulations demand a great deal of forethought and planning, and even then, "You can't guarantee how it's going to come out."

All of these pedagogies risk more precisely because they aspire to more. As Gamson summarized it: "[They] become ways of illustrating theory and concepts, of applying them, and of synthesizing_I mean, the highest level or kind of thinking_for our students."

Letting Go to Get Going

Maryellen Weimer's session, "The Learner-Centered Classroom: Changes in Instructional Practices and Assumptions," offered yet another report from the front. As with the speakers already mentioned, Weimer's remarks sounded cautionary tones within an encouraging, even enthusiastic, call for greater emphasis on student-centered learning. Girded by years of work and reading in instructional development, Weimer's remarks now took life from fresh, personal experience. She has recently returned to active teaching at the Berks Campus of Penn State. That teaching has given her the challenge of practicing the best of what she's been preaching, and it has underscored for her the wide gap between current conversations about teaching and current classroom realities.

Often her remarks had a compelling confessional power. For example: "In my own faculty development work for a lot of years I really resisted the emphasis on learning," Weimer reported. "I thought it was my job to work with teachers, and that a repertoire of strategies and techniques really did focus on instruction. But at some point the logic of the emphasis on learning really just becomes overwhelming." Teachers' interest in active learning is "born of desperation," she said. "What we've discovered in the crucible of our classrooms is that the old ways of teaching_lecturing, term papers, objective midterms or essay finals_don't result in very credible learning outcomes. So we're considering alternatives."

These alternatives tend to be relocations of focus to the student. While this new focus seems logical_overwhelmingly logical, as she puts it_it offers faculty (herself included) sharp challenges. Across the board, Weimer named four areas where classroom practice has not kept pace with the conversation about teaching: content coverage, authority, standards, and roles. Content coverage: "The fundamental faculty assumption with respect to content remains intact: More is always better," said Weimer. For faculty, it's a major issue. "When I propose in-class discussions of learning processes like problem-solving and critical thinking, most faculty nod, smile and take notes, but tell me later they can't do it because it takes too much time. 'I won't be able to get through the content,' they say." In Weimer's opinion, "If a course is learner-centered, that implies content present at the service of the learners. It implies consideration of how much the learner can handle successfully and an honest assessment of what he or she will need to learn, defined not by how things have been done in the past, but by the likely needs of the future."

Authority: Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed has had a huge impact on Weimer's thinking and made her more sensitive to how much power teachers wield and the effects of wielding it. "Traditionally, teachers exert enormous control over the learning process. Who decides the content, establishes how the material is to be learned, controls the pace and calendar, who speaks, for how long and whether they get credit for speaking? Who certifies that the quantity and quality of learning is enough or good enough?

"And what are the results?" she asks. "This is when the words get hard. I think what it results in is a collection of college students who sit before us pretty much totally dependent and submissive. 'What do you want me to do this paper on? How many pages? What's going to be on the exam?' The questions irritate us, but we've had a hand in making them. They're questions that come from learners who lack confidence in their ability to make decisions about what to learn, and how and when they learn it."

Standards: While faculty seem ever in favor of raising standards, they remain habitually vague in defining standards, Weimer maintains. She argued for "conceptual flexibility" in defining standards. "My assertion is that when education is learner-centered, standards do what they've always done. They insure the integrity of the educational enterprise. But their credibility rests not with whether they are higher or lower, but in their relevance to the learning needs of the individual in light of career and societal expectations."

Roles: One of the dilemmas of the teacher in an active, student-centered classroom comes to a head, as Weimer sees it, in the metaphors used to describe the new attitudes needed to encourage learning. "For expert and authority, we have coaches, guides, facilitators, designers of educational environments," said Weimer. The problem lies in the fact that "a coach wants his players to win and wants it badly. A guide's reputation depends on everyone making it in and out safely." Teachers find themselves called upon to make judgments, give grades, and declare that some students haven't won and may not have survived. How much power and authority can teachers let go of and still be teachers? Weimer described this as an area needing further intellectual exploration.

Despite these nagging questions, Weimer's recent experience in her own classes has encouraged her belief that relocating power does enhance learning. Unhappy with the way class participation often becomes a "fudge factor" at grading time, last semester Weimer let her class define the criteria by which their participation in the class would be assessed. "They proposed criteria that really tested my commitment to the cause to the limit," she confessed. "They decided that right and wrong answers would count equally. That made me very uncomfortable, and I expressed my concern to the class. And they offered a response that went something like this: 'When you make a mistake in class and the teacher points that out, it takes a great deal of courage to make your next contribution. Besides, teachers are always telling students how much there is to be learned from mistakes.' So right and wrong answers counted equally in that class, and people made mistakes and we learned from them.

"Even more persuasive to me though," Weimer continued, "has been the change in both the quantity and quality of student participation when the policy that governs that contribution is of their own creation. I really believe that education has the power to transform lives when students participate in the process, and we need to be able to discuss these radical ideas with a little less emotion and a little more reason."

James Rhem, Executive Editor