How to Create a Student Centered Lesson

As a teacher, it's more than likely that you've led a lesson on a tricky subject that your student's didn't quite grasp the concept of. This isn't a failing on your part - difficult topics make it harder to retain student concentration and application to a particular task. There are routes you can take to try and avoid this problem - even though it isn't all that easy to overcome. Formulating and implementing student centered lesson plans into your classroom could well be the answer to this complex conundrum, and making such magic happen doesn't take a total teaching makeover.

The best way to grasp the attention of a class is to run activities that are interesting and meet their needs as individuals. One of the vital stages in this process is making learning more active and engaging. It's been scientifically proven that children find it harder to memorize information by sitting and listening compared to being involved in practical tasks.

When devising potential hands-on activities to be conducted in the classroom, it's important to try and connect it to a real life circumstance. Even at a young age, children find it difficult to remember and become involved in lessons based around topics they cannot apply to themselves. Therefore, to make a learning session more student centered, it is the responsibility of the teacher to incorporate student's own opinions, ideas and life experiences into the specific activity.

Considering this, we could say that student centered learning encourages pupils to take more responsibility for their class and homework. Still, don't be fooled: this doesn't necessarily mean more pressure is applied to students, but rather that they have more say in what they learn, how they learn it, and the choices that they opt to take along the way.

Making sure that pupils are comfortable enough to learn in this manner demands teachers to introduce confidence building tasks. Not only does this come in handy for a student's self belief in their own abilities, but it's also a skill that they may carry with them and benefit from for the rest of their lives. When they reach adulthood, the ability to carry oneself properly and communicate fearlessly with colleagues and other members of society is one that ex-pupils will hold in high esteem.

Another technique used for the successful integration of student centered learning approaches involves nurturing the student and procuring the answer from them, rather than simply laying down the facts. It's all too easy for a teacher to see a pupil as someone who knows nothing, but in reality, this couldn't be further from the truth. All students have some base knowledge, and will often be able to reach correct answers and conclusions if given the correct support. To get this full, brilliant best from students, teachers should motivate children with regular enrichment opportunities.

As a general concept, learning never stops developing; there's always new and improved methods of teaching to try and assist pupils in accessing their full potentials more readily. Student centered learning is just one of these, and is a great practice to help students develop life skills as well as academic strategies.