STUDENT CENTERED LEARNING Task 603
Student Centered Learning is at the forefront of education. Several of the Wisconsin Educator Preparation Standards for teachers and many of the elements found in the edTPA and the Alverno clinical rubrics address teaching that is authentic, relevant, engaging, rigorous, and meaningful to learners. As such educators should always be developing and enhancing their own practices to meet these expectations and teach in meaningful ways.
*Reminder, all work and reflections should be your own work and not AI generated or simply pasted from another source.
If you are using AI tools such as grammarly or translator, when you upload your assignments into Moodle, please also include the original work.
TASK
OPTION 1: Become an expert
Alone, with a partner, or as a trio, do a deep dive into student centered learning. Become an expert (or expert team) on the subject. Develop an asynchronous professional development session for your peers in this class (and your future peers in the earlier Alverno classes) to participate in. It should be accessible and relevant to a variety of folks in educational settings (unless you really want to do a deep dive on, say, how to be a student centered social studies teacher). It should be geared towards novice educators and those in educator preparation programs.
This may include a video, tutorial, activities, assessments, strategies, etc.
It should be self standing meaning that folks could partake in what you make on their own or with a small team without needing anything that your resources don’t already provide.
It will hopefully convince, inspire, and/or give other novice educators the tools and confidence to be more student centered.
OPTION 2: Assess, Evaluate, Challenge & Adjust, Reassess, Reflect
In this option, you will first self assess yourself on your inclusion of student centered practices, adjust your practices, reassess, and then reflect on the process and future.
Assess: Write a few sentences about how confident, comfortable, and consistently you use student centered practices. You could even ask your kiddos to rate your classroom on some of the tenets of Student Centered Learning. Over the course of a week or so, actually keep track of every student centered practice you do. Big or small. Keep a log. Keep a tally. Make a list. Whatever makes sense to you to track your practices.
Evaluate: After that week, look at your data. What do you see? Not see? Maybe use thoughts, questions, epiphanies or SIT strategy to organize your evaluation. What does your data tell you? Excited or discouraged by your data?
Challenge and Adjust: Make a plan to challenge what you have been comfortable doing and adjust to increase the intention, intensity, consistency, and/or creativity of your student centered practices. Name it. Describe what the plan is and why.
Reassess: Monitor yourself for another week or so. Keep track of your student centered practices in the same way as you did above. At the end of week 2, ask your students the same questions you asked before you started self monitoring.
Reflect: What did you learn, how do you feel, what will you do moving forward. Feel free to use the head, heart, hands reflection tool or the SIT strategy if those may be helpful to you.
OPTION 3: Genius & Joy with Dr. Gholdy Muhammad
Investigate the philosophies and practices developed by Dr. Gholdy Muhammad in their books Cultivating Genius and Unearthing Joy. Check out some of their public podcasts, videos, presentations, interviews, books, etc. Create an artifact about what you have learned from this, how it may impact your practices, why it is important, how it relates to either Student Centered Practices or Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, what your thoughts and feelings are, etc. Connect it to yourself, your school, other texts, other theories, the world. What can you do with this in your own classroom? How is it similar or different to your own experiences in school? What’s your genius? What’s your joy? How do you bring that to your students?
For option 3, there is a folder Dr. Muhammad shared after her presentation with the IUE: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16PvgqCSjHTcts3u5c2-w7j6X5D3l3ADHdn2e27ZOgds/edit?usp=sharing
Q & A
What should my artifact be?
It really depends on which option you select and the way you approach it. I’d imagine that video, slide decks, surveys, graphs, infographics, recorded presentations, links, tool kits, and a variety of other things could work to demonstrate your learning. (Or a combination of these things)
ESSAY IS NOT AN OPTION FOR THIS LEARNING TASK.
Am I doing this alone or with peers?
Option 1 can be done alone, in a duo, or in a trio.
Option 2 and 3 will likely be alone.
What if I have a different idea about how to explore this topic and deepen my understanding in an authentic way?
Pitch me the idea. I am open to other ideas on the menu.
Will I have to share this?
If you pick option 1, yes. For sure. What you develop could be shared with other Alverno students.
If you pick option 2 or 3, you will only really be sharing ideas as part of our PLC.
RESOURCES
Reacquaint yourself with student centered learning practices:
https://www.prodigygame.com/main-en/blog/student-centered-learning/#:~:text=Student%2Dcentered%20learning%20is%20important%20as%20it%20focuses%20on%20individual,decisions%20that%20suit%20them%20best.
https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library?f%5B0%5D=teaching_resources_combined_types%3A772&f%5B1%5D=teaching_resources_combined_types%3A784
Green, C. & Harrington, C. (2020). Student-centered learning: In principle and in practice. Lansing, MI: Michigan Virtual University. Available from https://michiganvirtual.org/research/publications/student-centered-learning-in-principle-and-in-practice/
https://lincs.ed.gov/state-resources/federal-initiatives/teal/guide/studentcentered#:~:text=In%20the%20student%2Dcentered%20classroom,and%20by%20teaching%20each%20other.
https://www.educationcorner.com/developing-a-student-centered-classroom.html
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-5-ways-to-make-your-classroom-student-centered/2013/12?r=1543210386
https://tinyurl.com/headhearthandsfeedbackframe
https://dpi.wi.gov/education-workforce/prepare/educator-preparation-programs/wi-educator-preparation-standards
For option 3, there is a folder Dr. Muhammad shared after her presentation with the IUE: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16PvgqCSjHTcts3u5c2-w7j6X5D3l3ADHdn2e27ZOgds/edit?usp=sharing