Beyond Tradition: Taking a Learning-Centered Approach to Teaching
Many of us began our teaching careers convinced that good teaching primarily involved accurate, clear, and maybe even entertaining delivery of content. We may have understood course design as assembling a reading list or deciding which textbook chapter to cover each week. Generations of tradition, and often our own personal experience, went a long way in reinforcing this conception of teaching. Many of us felt quite successful in our teaching according to this model. But the abundance of research on learning produced in recent decades calls us to shift from a focus on content to a focus on what students learn.
Many of us already operate from a learning orientation; others may be somewhere in the process of pivoting from a content orientation to a learning orientation. Shifting our approach to teaching, especially our underlying beliefs about how learning happens, takes time. Whatever stage we’re in, we can enrich our students’ experiences and our own by applying strategies driven by the research on how humans learn.
No matter how much we might wish to do so, we can’t do the learning for our students. Each one of them must construct knowledge in their own brain; they each must build skills over time, through practice and feedback. Telling them what we know is usually not enough to create learning. We have to construct and oversee the conditions for learning. When we’re teaching effectively we’re engineering learning experiences, setting students up to figure things out. We give them resources, prompt questions, and direct their attention, helping them to see patterns, come to conclusions, and make connections. As Nobel laureate Herbert Simon, one of the founders of the field of cognitive science, pointed out, “Learning results from what the student does and thinks and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing what the student does to learn.”
When we shift to a learning orientation, we also take a more scholarly approach to teaching. We use research on learning to shape our course designs and classroom practices, and we collect evidence of learning to adjust and evaluate our teaching. By practicing learning-centered teaching, we can help students shift to a learning orientation too. We can provide ample opportunities for them to actively engage in learning, and we can draw their attention to their own learning as it happens. If you’ve ever been frustrated that students seem to have more of a performance orientation (a focus on points or grades) rather than a learning orientation (a focus on their developing knowledge and skills), it can be exciting to learn that their shifting to a learning orientation can start with you.
If you’d like to learn more about how research on learning can enhance college teaching, we hope you’ll join one of our faculty reading groups this fall. You can also schedule a consultation with us by emailing pro-teaching@fsu.edu. We look forward to working with you!