Assessing Student-Centered Learning
“The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place
where paradise can be created. The classroom, with all its limitations, remains
a location of possibility.” -bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress
As educators, we often discuss the ways our teaching methods
can, and do, benefit students, especially when it comes to student-centered
teaching philosophies. I agree that the area of composition studies has evolved
from the traditional model of the teacher as lecturer and the student as listener
to a more learner-focused environment. It is undeniably better that most instructors
have shifted to a teaching style that favors the learning process over the
teaching process and acknowledges that students have different learning styles.
First-year writing classes, in particular, have advanced with the teaching
concept that writing is a process, not simply a product.
But even after all the conversations we have (as colleagues and graduate students), I am often left wondering if we are doing enough. Are we really helping students to improve? I hope so, but how do we know? By what yardstick are we measuring improvement in the student-centered classroom?
I am truly inspired by the articles and books we read
that are by and about educators, but they are simply that; from the perspective
of and for the benefit of educators. How do we assess whether or not the student-centered
model is working for students? If educators can only report anecdotal
improvement about one group of students in a specific environment over time, is
our net wide enough to really judge the improvement? I ask these questions
because we spend a lot of time reading and thinking about how to improve the writing
classroom in order to benefit the students, specifically to improve their
writing through practice and critical thinking, but we often report that our
students are indifferent, at best, to our “innovations” in the classroom. So,
what is the disconnect?
Can we truly measure learning achievements that are
mostly subjective? After all, there are certain truths we know from experience
alone. For instance, we know that one teaching style does not work for all
students and if something does work, we cannot necessarily recreate it the next
time despite our best efforts. This fact doesn’t have to be quantified to be
proven true. So, I’m stuck. I’m not convinced that the current model of student-centered
teaching guarantees student development, but I’m not sure how to prove it. Naturally,
students typically don’t spend nearly as much time (if any) thinking about how
to improve student writing, but they do know themselves and appreciate when
instructors give them enough credit to be a part of their own learning process.
I don’t know the answer, but I think it might lie with the students themselves.
Writing this blog entry, of course, I am (as we all are) wearing both a
teaching and a student hat, so it seems to me like an advantageous moment to
think about bridging some of these gaps as we negotiate both roles. What do you
think?
Mary,
ReplyDeleteI feel like we're on the same page here. This is something I have really been asking myself a lot and struggling with this week. I think taking steps towards student-centered learning is a nice goal, but I don't feel as though we have any real method of knowing if we are being successful, as we all know student evals are not the most reliable indicators of student interaction in the classroom. How can we know if we are being effective when we get little to no gauge of how students are really doing?
Something that continues to bother me is the notion that contemporary composition is trying to become more inclusive while we are still operating in systems that were designed and built around exclusion. It's great to strive to create a student-friendly and inclusive classroom, but how successful can we really become if the system we are operating in was designed to do the exact opposite?
Abbie
Abbie, your last question really reminded me of the group exercise we did as part of writing center training - do you remember talking about AAE? Mostly I remember that it was a question with which we could come up with no good answer. If we don't play into the system, are we setting students up for failure? I think the only thing we could think of to do is acknowledge to our students that the system is exclusionary.
DeleteGoing back to the idea of taking steps to student centered learning, I found a post on the internet that talks about how from the time they're little we train students to raise their hand and be quiet when the teacher is speaking, and then we want to flip that in college. It's something that students have to unlearn - so how much of student's failure to interact in the classroom/don't really want to say what they're thinking on student evals is that learned power dynamic? Is the way to sort of open students up to the idea of a loose class structure to just similarly acknowledge it?
Mary,
ReplyDeleteI really liked your opening line of bell hooks' quote from Teaching to Transgress! (It was a required reading for Mike's class last semester). That books focuses a lot on the hope we have moving forward with education, which I think is a great connection with what we have been discussing in class.
I agree: I think it's incredibly frustrating that there isn't really a way to measure a certain method's success in the classroom. It gets even worse when you factor in that most of our students don't care whether or not they are succeeding, which makes it impossible to get any real feedback from them that can be used to evaluate our teaching methods. We are all also looking for different things in the classroom and would be looking for different phenomena depending on what we value in our own instruction.
One thing that helps me when I feel overwhelmed with assessment of my teaching is to pull all the way back and remember that my students, as well as myself, are human. There is no way to measure the progress a human makes without being subjective and judgmental. I prefer to skip this judgement, and instead just focus on my classroom one day at a time. What works on Monday might not work on Wednesday, so why worry about what's going to work for every educator as a whole all of the time? I'm just here to teach one class at a time and adjust as I go. We're given these huge questions to ponder as GAs when the best thing we can do it just take things day by day.
Good thoughts. You definitely bring up a great point about whether or not we can actually know if the learner-centered approach (or any?) is resulting in an effective learning experience. In these past few weeks, I have been feeling more and more that in some respects I am teaching blind. I don’t know what my students are truly getting out of the methods I am using. Or, whether these methods are actually what is best for the students. In some respects, I feel like it is a grand experiment when we put the student-centered approach into practice. Maybe that’s just something that can be said of all teaching (life?)?
ReplyDeleteHowever, I do think that training students to think critically about the manner of their education and ways to improve their learning in the classroom is a good start. It would make it easier to then get feedback from them about what is working, what is not working, and possibly even reasons why. Yet, then there are the students like Natalie mentioned that don’t really care if they succeed in a class like ours anyways. It’s just a great big circle and I’m sorry to say it, but there’s no simple solution. Then again, what noble, worthwhile problems had easy solutions anyways?
Mary,
ReplyDeleteI hear you. I think your anxieties are ones not unique to educators. Often we (pre-service and veteran educators) question the transfer and implications of our pedagogical strategies and techniques. I think it is fair to say that this is why so much theory exists; because without need, without anxiety and inquiry, the model would remain standardized. We all want to make some sort of difference, right? I think most all of us would agree, whether we are teaching for assistantship, teaching for civic education, teaching for discipline-specific knowledge advancement (or all of the above), we want to believe that we are doing something in our rooms that makes the “thing” click, that incites intrinsic motivation and advances individual inquiry and curiosity, that makes doing something do something. Though oftentimes theory seems stuck in an artificial world of metaphor or false analogy, we must trust ourselves to experiment, to not resist trial simply because of error, and to hone our craft through consistent bouts of reflective thinking. Differentiated learning is difficult to master and I argue, impossible to master. As you say, it all seems so subjective, so intensely individual, that one method cannot be mass-applied. At the risk of sounding absurd, I think educators must rely, at least to some extent, on faith. Though efforts do not always equate to success, I find it important to remember that just as the most hardworking, ingenious pedagogues operate, so too does the student who resists every extended hand or new technique… Furthermore, though we all seem to reserve special places in hell for student assessment, I think its time we reallocated our efforts towards assessing student progress in English. Those habits of mind that we desire are so often, so painstakingly immeasurable. If we are to truly begin to understand progress, I think we must dedicate ourselves to a fixation on the formative ways in which we assess our “innovations.”