Post Teaching #1-Elisabeth

The concept of student-centered learning is something that we talked a lot about in 276 with George. But some things have occured to me as I've gotten further into the major. First, the abount of ownership that students are given needs to correspond with their abilities. That may seem obvious, but if students who are very new to theatre are given an assignment that an advanced class might be given without the literacy that advanced students have, they will either panic and not do it, or try to do it, but fail because they simply don't have the necessary literacy. The same is true of advanced students. I've seen teachers who refuse to allow very compitant students any type of ownership, and lose the respect and attention of their students. Ownership is not the same for each class, or even for each student. It is easy for teachers to set a cirriculum and keep it, instead of adapting it to students needs and capabilites.
The words student-centered learning also make me think of something else. Currently I am a TA for 114, I have a student who has missed a lot of class for family reasons, and is asking for extra credit options. On the one hand, some would say that others have been doing the work on time and have been in class, and so it is unfair to give this student extra help when he has not been doing what other students have been. But on the other hand, what does everyone else have to do with this one student. Student-centered learning also means, at least to me, working with the individaul student to make sure their needs are met. If that means special help, then that is what happens in many cases. Obviously there is a method to this, and you can't just give out good greades to everyone if they didn't earn them, but you can work with students who need extra help without it having a negative effect on the rest of the class.