The idea of a "child-centred" education has been claimed by those who oppose both knowledge and explicit instruction. And yet, here's the thing, it doesn't matter if you *want* education to be "child/human-centred"; all learning *is* child/human-centred, whether you like it or not, or claim this phrase as "yours" or not. Education will always be centred on the person, regardless of what type of pedagogical approach or curriculum you prefer.
Human beings have flourished because they learn. For our species, most of that learning is intellectual; it involves the symbolism and structure of language. The human evolutionary advantage comes from our ability to acquire and use new information via the construction of schema in our brain. Children develop their physical prowess far more slowly than their intellectual capacity. My 8-month-year old still hasn't worked out that launching himself from the sofa onto a hard floor using only his face as a cushion could result in permanent injury.... And yet he can wave at me, copy my facial expressions and create outbursts of communicative noise. We don't have fangs or claws or armor; we have big brains. We are programmed to manipulate our environment via communication, not physical prowess.
In that sense, humans are "learners" - learning is what we do. It shouldn't be surprising, therefore, that our brains work in mostly similar ways. You are 99.9% genetically identical to every other human. Having worked in the UK, Chile, and now Costa Rica, my experience confirms this common humanity. Working-class white British boys in Croydon and their more socially advantaged counterparts in Latin America share a propensity for obscene graffiti and play-fighting. From Stevenage to Santiago, the same pattern of adolescent angst, drama, and fall-outs is repeated across genders and social divides. Devonshire Morris-dancing and Chilean cueca have similar steps, costumes, and cultural importance. Our traditions mirror other cultures thousands of miles apart; the mere fact of these shared human experiences should speak volumes.
We are more similar than we are different.
How could it be otherwise?
The person will always be at the center of education because learning happens inside the brain of an individual, and our minds are far more similar than they are different. If learning is a change in long term memory, or the gradual deepening of conceptual understanding, or even a process of coming to understand the world, it takes place inside of people. We educate human beings.
The "child-centered" mantra has been co-opted by those who have built an entire educational philosophy around the idea that explicit or direct instruction of knowledge is bad educational practice. Fortunately, the false dichotomies between "teacher-centered lectures" and child-centered "active learning" have been dismantled by a committed band of researchers and interested teachers. We know that explicit instruction involves questioning, practicing deliberately, processing information in all kinds of different ways. It's far from passive. Part of the reason these false dichotomies have been dismantled is that education will always put the child at the center. Teachers and researchers are thinking deeply and engaging in professional discussion together around factors that impact learning; our endpoint is the same, more learning for the human. These questions concern different techniques; one side of the argument shouldn't be allowed to raise their flag on the territory of being "centered on the human."
Think of typical educational phrases like "empowering learners." Ask a teacher if they want to empower their learners, they will say yes. The devil is in the detail. Knowledge is empowering, thinking is empowering, and skills are empowering. The only question that matters is, what methodologies and techniques are best for producing amazing learning in the child? Ideology must be left aside here. The stakes are too high.
Learning always happens inside a person. The teaching, the activities, the task, behavior policies, the environment, all of these are factors that affect learning - they are the stimuli that produce some change in the person. The change itself will always happen inside the person who is learning. We measure this learning, ultimately, by talking to the child, by asking them questions or getting them to do things, by seeing what it is that they know or can do now that they weren't able to do previously. If we are smart, we will do all we can to ensure that this progress is above and beyond what would have happened in the absence of our input. We direct, modify, control, and align processes, procedures, and people in poz of amazing learning or exceptional progress. The person is - without a doubt - at the center of this whole process. It doesn't matter if yohave a preference for one type of input or another, all educational methods are human-centered.
The written curriculum - either PD for teachers or children - is the expression of our intention. It is what we want everyone to know and be able to do. Yet for all the papers, documentation, rubrics, and protocols, ultimately, we need to modify the mind of an individual child. Our attempts to make learning visible, to transfer quality onto paper cannot be successful if we don't appreciate that teaching is a human enterprise involving the interaction of people with other people. Cutting through the layers of intellectual verbiage to unite around this common purpose shouldn't be beyond educationalists who purport to put children first.
Those who believe in a knowledge-rich education in an ordered environment do so because they think it is the best for humans. It's only a small leap to say these conditions are the more "child-centered." If the children in the school learn more, then that school is more human-centered. That should be the only criteria.
When we sit down and plan out the concepts, ideas, and tasks of the curriculum in our different subject disciplines, we should be thinking, what does a child most need to know and understand to be successful? To a certain degree, that means the content specified by national curricula. Exam success, literacy, and numeracy are associated with improved life outcomes. I don't think anyone would argue for correlation above causation in this case. And yet, because they have co-opted the narrative for so long, it's not seen as "child-centered" to begin from what we want children to know. Child-centred starts with the person and seeks to grow outwards from them. And yet, when we examine this supposed dichotomy, it falls apart. It's a mere illusion. Of course, it is the case that the child is the one learning, but we still need to choose the input.
*(Important side-note, being person-centered is also about treasuring and cherishing teaching. For children to learn more in a school, teachers must be learning. Quality teacher professional development requires a culture of everyone deliberately seeking out information, practicing, and seeking feedback to get better at their job. Teachers are tired of implementation overdrive, tired of near-permanent policy changes perforating the integrity of the profession. Research provides a focus; it offers a set of ideas to which can be tested in practice. Yes, not all research is generalizable beyond the context in which it took place - teacher judgment is always going to be necessary - but having information of higher reliability, higher rigour and validity, sounder causal implications - is a good thing. Access to high-quality research from the more causally rigorous sciences is empowering for teachers.)
Everybody who works in education wants to help people (young and old) be more competent than they would in the absence of our help, so we are all human-centered educators. We aim for exceptional growth and improvement across a cohort and we should work together on identifying and prioritizing the inputs that will best achieve the goal of amazing learning. In secondary schools, in front of us is a young person with a mind-body and our task is to ensure amazing learning happens for that child. The choice of group work or explicit instruction will depend on the subject, the intention, the moment (try teaching soccer without group work). We shouldn't allow the idea of being child-centered to be co-opted by more traditional forms of progressivism.
The question is, are we setting them up for success in the curriculum and life? If you say that academic exam success is not for everyone, I'd argue you are neglecting your responsibility to give all children access to the cognitive tools culture and society have provided for our collective success. In other words, you are not child-centered at all. All children need to learn how to read, write, and do the math. Education is their right. To argue that some aren't "cut out" for it, is an awful form of intellectual snobbery and would lead us down the same pathway that the entire concept of a comprehensive education was intended to solve, the separation of children into academic and non-academic at the age of 11.
Learning is invisible until it is expressed. It means nothing written as a rubric, shown on a beautiful curriculum progression model, or contained in a textbook. All these are factors that impact learning. Getting work done is not the same as learning. A child might have produced a fantastic presentation or written an excellent essay, but if you sit down and talk to him a week later and he doesn't remember what he wrote, the chances are, it was a waste of time.
Being human-centered is about cutting through the nonsense and uniting around a common set of ideas for improving the learning and progress of everyone. The false-dichotomies are holding us back.
Human beings have flourished because they learn. For our species, most of that learning is intellectual; it involves the symbolism and structure of language. The human evolutionary advantage comes from our ability to acquire and use new information via the construction of schema in our brain. Children develop their physical prowess far more slowly than their intellectual capacity. My 8-month-year old still hasn't worked out that launching himself from the sofa onto a hard floor using only his face as a cushion could result in permanent injury.... And yet he can wave at me, copy my facial expressions and create outbursts of communicative noise. We don't have fangs or claws or armor; we have big brains. We are programmed to manipulate our environment via communication, not physical prowess.
In that sense, humans are "learners" - learning is what we do. It shouldn't be surprising, therefore, that our brains work in mostly similar ways. You are 99.9% genetically identical to every other human. Having worked in the UK, Chile, and now Costa Rica, my experience confirms this common humanity. Working-class white British boys in Croydon and their more socially advantaged counterparts in Latin America share a propensity for obscene graffiti and play-fighting. From Stevenage to Santiago, the same pattern of adolescent angst, drama, and fall-outs is repeated across genders and social divides. Devonshire Morris-dancing and Chilean cueca have similar steps, costumes, and cultural importance. Our traditions mirror other cultures thousands of miles apart; the mere fact of these shared human experiences should speak volumes.
We are more similar than we are different.
How could it be otherwise?
The person will always be at the center of education because learning happens inside the brain of an individual, and our minds are far more similar than they are different. If learning is a change in long term memory, or the gradual deepening of conceptual understanding, or even a process of coming to understand the world, it takes place inside of people. We educate human beings.
The "child-centered" mantra has been co-opted by those who have built an entire educational philosophy around the idea that explicit or direct instruction of knowledge is bad educational practice. Fortunately, the false dichotomies between "teacher-centered lectures" and child-centered "active learning" have been dismantled by a committed band of researchers and interested teachers. We know that explicit instruction involves questioning, practicing deliberately, processing information in all kinds of different ways. It's far from passive. Part of the reason these false dichotomies have been dismantled is that education will always put the child at the center. Teachers and researchers are thinking deeply and engaging in professional discussion together around factors that impact learning; our endpoint is the same, more learning for the human. These questions concern different techniques; one side of the argument shouldn't be allowed to raise their flag on the territory of being "centered on the human."
Think of typical educational phrases like "empowering learners." Ask a teacher if they want to empower their learners, they will say yes. The devil is in the detail. Knowledge is empowering, thinking is empowering, and skills are empowering. The only question that matters is, what methodologies and techniques are best for producing amazing learning in the child? Ideology must be left aside here. The stakes are too high.
Learning always happens inside a person. The teaching, the activities, the task, behavior policies, the environment, all of these are factors that affect learning - they are the stimuli that produce some change in the person. The change itself will always happen inside the person who is learning. We measure this learning, ultimately, by talking to the child, by asking them questions or getting them to do things, by seeing what it is that they know or can do now that they weren't able to do previously. If we are smart, we will do all we can to ensure that this progress is above and beyond what would have happened in the absence of our input. We direct, modify, control, and align processes, procedures, and people in poz of amazing learning or exceptional progress. The person is - without a doubt - at the center of this whole process. It doesn't matter if yohave a preference for one type of input or another, all educational methods are human-centered.
The written curriculum - either PD for teachers or children - is the expression of our intention. It is what we want everyone to know and be able to do. Yet for all the papers, documentation, rubrics, and protocols, ultimately, we need to modify the mind of an individual child. Our attempts to make learning visible, to transfer quality onto paper cannot be successful if we don't appreciate that teaching is a human enterprise involving the interaction of people with other people. Cutting through the layers of intellectual verbiage to unite around this common purpose shouldn't be beyond educationalists who purport to put children first.
Those who believe in a knowledge-rich education in an ordered environment do so because they think it is the best for humans. It's only a small leap to say these conditions are the more "child-centered." If the children in the school learn more, then that school is more human-centered. That should be the only criteria.
When we sit down and plan out the concepts, ideas, and tasks of the curriculum in our different subject disciplines, we should be thinking, what does a child most need to know and understand to be successful? To a certain degree, that means the content specified by national curricula. Exam success, literacy, and numeracy are associated with improved life outcomes. I don't think anyone would argue for correlation above causation in this case. And yet, because they have co-opted the narrative for so long, it's not seen as "child-centered" to begin from what we want children to know. Child-centred starts with the person and seeks to grow outwards from them. And yet, when we examine this supposed dichotomy, it falls apart. It's a mere illusion. Of course, it is the case that the child is the one learning, but we still need to choose the input.
*(Important side-note, being person-centered is also about treasuring and cherishing teaching. For children to learn more in a school, teachers must be learning. Quality teacher professional development requires a culture of everyone deliberately seeking out information, practicing, and seeking feedback to get better at their job. Teachers are tired of implementation overdrive, tired of near-permanent policy changes perforating the integrity of the profession. Research provides a focus; it offers a set of ideas to which can be tested in practice. Yes, not all research is generalizable beyond the context in which it took place - teacher judgment is always going to be necessary - but having information of higher reliability, higher rigour and validity, sounder causal implications - is a good thing. Access to high-quality research from the more causally rigorous sciences is empowering for teachers.)
Everybody who works in education wants to help people (young and old) be more competent than they would in the absence of our help, so we are all human-centered educators. We aim for exceptional growth and improvement across a cohort and we should work together on identifying and prioritizing the inputs that will best achieve the goal of amazing learning. In secondary schools, in front of us is a young person with a mind-body and our task is to ensure amazing learning happens for that child. The choice of group work or explicit instruction will depend on the subject, the intention, the moment (try teaching soccer without group work). We shouldn't allow the idea of being child-centered to be co-opted by more traditional forms of progressivism.
The question is, are we setting them up for success in the curriculum and life? If you say that academic exam success is not for everyone, I'd argue you are neglecting your responsibility to give all children access to the cognitive tools culture and society have provided for our collective success. In other words, you are not child-centered at all. All children need to learn how to read, write, and do the math. Education is their right. To argue that some aren't "cut out" for it, is an awful form of intellectual snobbery and would lead us down the same pathway that the entire concept of a comprehensive education was intended to solve, the separation of children into academic and non-academic at the age of 11.
Learning is invisible until it is expressed. It means nothing written as a rubric, shown on a beautiful curriculum progression model, or contained in a textbook. All these are factors that impact learning. Getting work done is not the same as learning. A child might have produced a fantastic presentation or written an excellent essay, but if you sit down and talk to him a week later and he doesn't remember what he wrote, the chances are, it was a waste of time.
Being human-centered is about cutting through the nonsense and uniting around a common set of ideas for improving the learning and progress of everyone. The false-dichotomies are holding us back.
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