Child Centered Page

In a classroom of 20 children you have 20 different learning styles and 20 different personalities, 20 different ways of taking in information and giving information. Great teachers know this and know that one lesson plan, one mode of teaching, is never going to be good enough. Can that teacher create 20 different lesson plans? Of course not, but that great teacher knows that their students are on different levels and have different ways of processing information. So child-centered teaching and learning basically starts from the child inside-out rather than the curriculum outside-in. The starting point is looking at the child and what he or she needs and then building your curriculum outward from there.

The old-fashioned way of doing it would be a one-size-fits-all curriculum, and that curriculum would be delivered and children would be expected to adapt to it. Traditionally, curricula were developed to be targeted to the middle of the class. Therefore, kids at the top were bored, and the kids who were not at that point often struggled. Great teachers are able to differentiate based on a lot different factors: the skills development of the children, where kids are academically, and the personality of the child. Does that child need to be up and moving? Or can he or she be more passive? So, it’s really a question of the starting point. Where is your starting point? Is the starting point the child, or is the starting point the curriculum? Both are important. However, it’s really looking at the individual child and starting from there.

The main thing you see in a child-centered classroom are engaged students. When I walk into a classroom and I’m assessing a classroom situation, I’m actually not looking at the teacher; I’m looking at the children and I’m trying to assess if and how the students are engaged. Because when students are engaged, you know you’ve got it just about right. Although there’s a time and a place for lecture, and a time and a place for direct instruction, they only have a minor place in a child-centered classroom. An example of a child-centered classroom might look like four students discussing a particular question in a book, another group of four students working on a dramatic production, and another group of four students discussing a different aspect of the book. Finally, the whole group might come back together and share their work. In a child-centered classroom, there is movement, there is energy, and there is flexibility in terms of what’s happening in that classroom.