Individual Learning

I was an English teacher for one period today. Or, more accurately, I was sitting at an English teacher's desk. Her lesson plans were to have her students work on several projects that related to their recent reading. They were all quite well-behaved and on-task, and thus I really didn't have to do anything.

I would consider that classroom heavily student-centered. The students were self-paced and meeting the necessary objectives on their own terms. But, that doesn't mean that all seatwork implies a student-centered classroom. It depends upon the nature of the work.

As an example, this article, written by Alfie Kohn (via VS, of course) calls attention to the danger of rote worksheets and meaningless standardization as replacements for real education. Same old, same old, but oh so accurate.