Student-Centred Isn’t a Teaching Style

There are some phrases in education that are difficult to question without sounding as though you’ve announced that you don’t care about kids, and ‘student-centred’ is one of them. Who is going to stand up and declare themselves against centring students?

‘Student-centred’ is often used as though it names a particular style of teaching. If students are making choices, working in groups or leading an inquiry, the lesson is student-centred. If the teacher is explaining, modelling or directing the learning, it’s teacher-led. The labels are treated as opposites, with one caring, progressive and empowering and the other controlling, old-fashioned and all about copying from the board; you’ll probably imaging someone pointing with a metre stick at a blackboard…

If someone tried to convince me that explicitly teaching a complex concept wasn’t student-centred, I’d have to tell them to gi’or and toddle off.

Who leads the visible activity and whose needs lead the decisions are two entirely different questions. If my students need me to explain something clearly, break it down, model it, give them examples and check that they’ve understood, then doing exactly that is centred on them. If they’re ready to make decisions and work more independently, stepping back is centred on them too.

A student-led lesson isn’t automatically student-centred. Students can be busy, engaged and making choices whilst learning remarkably little. They may be confused, relying on the person in the group who already knows what they’re doing or producing something impressive without thinking very deeply. The lesson may look empowering from the back of the room, but its appearance tells us very little about whether it gave those students what they needed.

The research on inquiry makes the supposed divide difficult to defend. A meta-analysis of 72 studies found that guidance improved students’ inquiry processes, performance and learning. Students can have agency whilst the teacher explains, structures, questions and gives feedback. Inquiry doesn’t require the teacher to disappear.

It becomes particularly irritating when ‘student-centred’ is used as a way of describing yourself rather than work you’re prepared to do. Saying that you value agency, inclusion, curiosity and student voice is easy. Assessing what students understand, noticing who is quietly lost, choosing the right amount of structure and adapting your teaching accordingly is much harder.

Inquiry, agency and student choice can be exactly what students need. We should use them because they’re the best way for those students to learn at that point, not because they advertise that we’re student-centred. If another approach would serve the students better and we choose the one that better fits the identity we want to project, then the students aren’t at the centre of the decision. We are. Calling it student-centred is virtue signalling, and we may be fooling ourselves too.

The phrase can also create an easy moral high ground. When questions about a method are recast as evidence that the person asking doesn’t care about kids, the discussion stops being about learning. The teacher is forced to defend their character instead of everyone examining whether the method worked.

Caring about students requires us to take those decisions seriously. We need to know the students, understand the content, work out what they need at that point and check whether our choice helped them learn. A favoured method can’t do that thinking for us.

You don’t become student-centred by saying that you are, any more than calling a task empowering guarantees that students will feel empowered by it. The claim has to be earned through the far less glamorous work of recognising what the kids in front of you need and being able to provide it.

No single method will always be the student-centred one. A teacher needs enough skill and range to explain, model, question, guide, support or step back. Sometimes students will lead the lesson. Sometimes the teacher will. Who stood at the front tells us very little.

When we call teaching ‘student-centred’, what are we actually describing: who appeared to be leading the lesson, or whose needs led the decisions?