Shelley Wright describes why she has stopped flipping the classroom and how she has moved to student-centered learning. She states: "Most teachers who opt for the flipped classroom strategy are not pursuing a student-centered approach to learning. The traditional model is simply being reversed."
"Learning isn’t simply a matter of passively absorbing new information while watching a lecture on video; new knowledge should be actively constructed. When we shifted to a student-centred classroom, my students took control of their learning, and I quit lecturing. I haven’t lectured in almost two years."
Shelley points out the importance of students owning their learning:
"I want my students to own their learning. It’s been stated that “At its most basic level, the flipped classroom gives students more control over their educations, allowing them to start and stop or rewind important lectures to focus on key points.” To me, this isn’t giving students control over their education, although it may be creating new markets for content-oriented videos and related materials.
In our classroom, we sit down with the curriculum, and students actually see what the outcomes and objectives are. We then have a dialogue about what my students’ learning might look like. They have a choice over what order they are going to work on outcomes, how they are going to learn and reach those outcomes, and how they are going to show me what they have learned.
As my students worked with me to invent our own version of student-centred learning, we realized that the three questions every student in our classroom had to answer were: What are you going to learn? How are you going to learn it? How are you going to show me your learning? This became our mantra — our framework for learning. This is what it means to give students “control over their education.”
Thank you Shelley for your insight and thoughts about student-centered learning!
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Shelley shared with us how she and her students have changed since she changed her teacher role and let go so her students took responsibility for their learning. Giving ownership of learning back to the learner became her focus when creating learner-centered personalized learning environments. Discover how she saw her role changing in this thought provoking blog.