"Student Centered Learning Environments".
Traditionally, American educators have relied on authoritativeness in their classrooms and the always-boring lecture class approach to promote learning among their students. This approach seems to have failed profusely among our nations youth and just by looking back at drop out rate statistics over the past twenty years one can see this approach has failed themselves. Teachers today need to capture student's attention by becoming a student themselves and by regulating their authoritative positions to a more friend/friend relationship with their students. Not to say that teachers should not play a commanding role in their classrooms, but they should allow their students to learn own and/or with their own convictions also.
Student centered learning is a very effective and important way to organize a classroom and can prove to be very detrimental to a child's learning experience as a whole. "In a student-centered classroom, the teacher/facilitator must be prepared to relinquish traditional authority, allowing the students to accept greater control over their own work. Mutual respect, dialogue, and freedom are tantamount to the success, indeed the survival, of the student centered classroom." (Alcorn & Wittgen 91) For many teachers it is very hard to allow students to guide the way your classroom runs throughout the school day, but if one can make it work then the results will be outstanding.
Many times students do not learn well in the traditional lecture based teaching atmosphere. In every classroom there may be as many as twenty-five different ways in which your students learn information. The nice thing about student centered learning environments is that it is very easy to pick up on which learning styles are being used in your own environment and it is also much easier to accommodate all the styles at once. Thus, making your teaching experience a little easier and at the same time a whole lot more effective.
