Learner Centered Teaching

“I can’t teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.” – Socrates

Remembering the time I spent in school in Saudi Arabia brings back a lot of memories about the classroom and the role of the teacher in the classroom. Spending most of my time growing up in England, going to English school during the day, and spending tea time being homeschooled for Arabic school, I suffered a cultural shock from the high school education system in Saudi Arabia. I remember that classroom in England were fun, creative and a very comfortable. Although I did sense that the teacher was always the center of the classroom, and that our textbooks and the teacher herself had the ability to teach us every thing. In England we were given homework, and we had specific instructions for what to do on every assignment. We had little quizzes that would accumulate towards our final grade. I felt that I get a lot done in an academic semester and that I grew and learned every year.

When we went back to Saudi Arabia, I was a bit shocked that all we did was receive information from the teacher, write it down in our notebooks and memorize it for midterm exams. There was no class discussion, no room for creativity, and we were just repeating the things that the teacher wanted us to learn. Add to this prospect that any idea that the student comes up with is not taken seriously and is disregarded and also looked down upon. Exams are a form of dumping out all of the information that you learned that semester. Once students are done with the exam, I've personally witnessed some girls either throwing their books in the trash or ripping their books in the cafeteria. This broke my HEART! Seriously! Although the British education system was not that student or learner centered, but it still allowed room for personalization.

Another classroom dynamic  that really bothered me was the fact that we had to stand up when we had to answer questions. I didn't realize this, and was asked to leave the class for the disrespect I caused the teacher. I really felt like I was what Paulo Frier describes in his radical pedagogy, as containers of the Banking Model of Education that have to be filled with knowledge or spoon fed. He introduced the idea of "Problem Solving Education" where he deconstructs the place of the teacher in the educational equation.This is a very funny video that explains Paulo Frier's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 

        One of the most important concepts in Learner Centered Teaching is the "The Role of The Teacher." I love the metaphors that Maryellen Weimer provides the reader in the beginning of this chapter. According to Weimer, on the major roles of the teacher is becoming a FACILITATOR in the process of education. The most memorable of these metaphor is the teacher-midwife who is their at the birth of education (62). Giving birth to two children, I used to hate midwives, I thought that they just sat their while I was in extreme pain from labour. However, it is after I gave birth to my children, that I noticed how helpful they were during the delivery or even after. They bring you ice cubes to crunch, and they check your baby's heart rate all the time. Without them, I think giving birth would have been much more harder. Just like the midwife, the teacher can also be a facilitator of learning.

       One of the facilitative teaching principals that Weimer provides is that faculty should encourage students to learn from and with each other. I believe that this can be done not only with group work, but also allowing the students to be responsible for delivering some content in class. The students will definitely learn how difficult it is to prepare something that can be taught to class by having them do pair presentations on the topic of that day. I think that this is a great way to get them involved in the process of learning and allowing them to feel responsible for their learning too. This activity allows them to learn from and with each other. It was only when I did my master degree, that my professors in Saudi Arabia took to this activity. We were mostly responsible for the content. I know that this is a graduate degree activity, and by having student work in pairs, the presentation will be less stressful and even more manageable.

    One other great activity that Weimer presents teachers is demonstrating the "value of collaboration in a venue that students take seriously: exams" (81). Weimer assigns her students study groups, that participate in a group exam experience. She allows the students to prepare some review materials for the whole class, and she leaves it to the students to decide if they want to study together for it. As for assessment, Weimer grades individual papers first and then calculates an average score for the group. Then she grades the group exam, and if the group exam is higher, the students get to an individual average added to their individual scores. I believe that this activity is beneficial for courses that have heavy content material. For writing courses, I would do this activity with research resources like MLA or APA. I would develop an exam on each and see if they can also learn these two helpful research tools.

Works Cited 

        Weimer, Maryellen. Learner -Centered Teaching : Five Key Changes to Practice. Second edition. ed., San Francisco, CA, Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Imprint, 2013.

Images
learner centered teaching 

saudi arabia school classroom  

Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1Yqr4PByOY 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEtjl3TqwB4&has_verified=1