Student-Centered Learning

Learning about student-centered learning was a good experience as I have been teaching. I used to think a lot of this was doing activities, partly because that's how I learn, so when lessons are more activity based I come away with more and remember it longer. I, honestly, put discussion into my lesson plans because I knew we were supposed to. But as I was teaching I realized the great value in both, and that both should and do focus on student-centered learning. One thing we did was making lists. We did this partly at the suggestion of the teacher because she had learned that it really helped the students learn when as a class we created a list of what we were learning, and they wrote it down, that way they could refer to it later. Talking about it, and writing it down seemed to really help them keep it in their minds. I realized that student-centered learning is doing anything that centers on the students and how they learn best, regardless of what that is. If the students do better with activities, include more activities, but if they do better with discussion, do more discussion. One of my weaknesses is that I center my lessons according to how I learn, because I assume that's how all theatre students learn, but that is not true. Especially with kids in Junior High as a lot of them aren't necessarily "theatre kids" but are there for the credit. There was one lesson we were doing where I wasn't planning on having a large discussion, but jumping into the activity right off. But as I started talking I realized they were engaged and were learning from what I was saying, so I talked a little longer than planned, and it seemed to really help. Center the lessons around how they learn best and they will learn more.