The Four Foci of Effective Educators

It is ironic that the method of teaching by passive lecture was wholly adopted in higher education, an industry populated by professionals who conduct research as a significant aspect of their employment. The lack of evidence for traditional instruction never seems to have troubled anyone. But, technological developments managed, nonetheless, to tip the traditional education apple cart.

Sitting dozens of students in a room to receive information presented by an expert is a strategy that evolved from the industrial revolution, and was spurred by the GI Bill. Interestingly, the advent of online learning prompted an examining of what teaching is, and how to ensure its efficacy. There was, for decades, an untested assumption that sitting in a room while an authority dispensed wisdom was an effective teaching method. The operative word being teaching; as it was effective for the person performing the work.

This paradigm began to be questioned when new modes of delivery prompted significant revision to the delivery of higher education. When first introduced, distributing knowledge through online instruction proved to be ineffective, as it tended to produce disengaging, plain text pages. As a result, educators seemed to split into camps: those who disavowed the medium as the source of the problem, and those who recognized the need to reconsider their own terms of engagement.

Student Centered Learning | Learner Centered Teaching

The concept of student centered learning, also referred to as learner centered teaching, was born of a certain cognitive dissonance realized by educators observing the negative response of students to so-called page turner courses (lecture-based classes converted to text and loaded into online learning management systems for students to access). Organizations such as the International Society for Technology in Education propagated a new paradigm, Student Centered Learning (SCL). The ISTE defines SCL as:

[moving] students from passive receivers of information to active participants in their own discovery process. What students learn, how they learn it and how their learning is assessed are all driven by each individual student’s needs and abilities.

This concept aligned well with the emerging technologies of online education because these new systems introduced the potential for adaptive education (though this potential is only now beginning to be realized). Alongside the development of online education was the introduction of learning style inventories (e.g. Kolb and LSQ) promoting the ideas that learners can enhance their retention by adapting their learning strategies based on their learning style, and - by extension - educators can improve student performance by offering instruction in ways that vary according to different learning style preferences. In recent years, the concept has further evolved into the development of adaptive learning technologies (or personalized education). Adaptive learning:

uses artificial intelligence to actively tailor content to each individual’s needs (McGraw Hill, 2017).

Learning Rather Than Learner Centered

The concept of student centered learning was intended to shift focus from the preferences of the instructor to the needs of the learner, from an emphasis on content to an emphasis on outcomes. However, the reliance on student evaluations of teaching may have helped push the concept of student centered learning into representing the importance of student comfort and satisfaction. Learning is, quite often, an inherently uncomfortable experience. And grades may be dissatisfying when the student does not receive what they expected.

In interviewing educators who deliver effective online courses, an important distinction emerged: such instructors were certainly interested in their students needs, exhibited caring about them (student-centered), but also emphasized the process (teaching-centered), the content (content-centered), and student attainment (learning-centered). A lesson of the research was that there is a paradigm of education that is more aptly called Learning Centered Education. For the most effective educators, learning centered education is one element balanced among four.

Finding the Balance

There needs to be inclusion of the different foci (content, teacher, student, and learning). It is at this apex potentially where the greatest results may be achieved. After all, there is merit in each perspective.

• The quality of the content remains critically important.

• The teacher remains an expert with much to offer in terms of wisdom, as well as the invaluable contribution of serving as a content filter in today’s age of information overload. The teacher offers the gift of separating good from bad information, and placing information into an applied context.

• The needs of the student certainly must be considered, and adaptation to meet those needs continues to grow in importance as the cost of education rises. Increasingly the value proposition will lie with the individualization of the learning experience to reduce waste and sally students forth to their careers and to informed civic participation.

• Lastly, and most importantly, is the need to focus on learning as the deliverable of teaching. Though learning is often quite challenging to measure, its consequences are irrefutable when a student proceeds from novice to journeyman.