Learner Centered Ideology

Presented to:
Sir Khalid Mehmood
Overview And Examples

Aemen Dilber
 Learner Centered Ideology
• Learner centered ideology is a phenomenon
that puts the learner at the center.
• According to learner centered ideology,
educators should develop school curriculum
that allow students to become active
participants in an activity, in the content, in the
lesson and have more choice on what they
want to do and how to do it.
• According to Schiro (2008), schools should be
places where individual enjoy as they acquire
knowledge and develop their inherent
capabilities.
 The Ideal School
• Underlying the thoughts of learner centered
educators is an image or vision of an ideal
school: “school of tomorrow”, as John Dewey
wrote in 1915.
• An important dimension of learner centered
educators vision of their ideal school is that
they perceive it to be different from the
traditional school.
• It is different in atmosphere, housing,
furniture, different in its basic philosophy and
psychology; different in the role that it assigns
to pupil and teacher initiative. (Rugg and
Shumaker, 1928)
 Ideal School for All Learner
• The ideal schools envisioned by Learner
centered educators have existed in the past and
exist today. They exist at all levels of
education.
• Francis Parker promoted them at all
educational levels in the 1890s.
 The Learner-Centered School
• The learner-centered school concentrates on
meeting the needs, interest, desires of a child
and insists that ‘children should not be
conscious of adult expectancy.
• The learner-centered ideal school is different
from the traditional school because it is based
on “nothing less than reorientation of entire
school around the child.” (Rugg & Shumaker)
• First, Learner-centered schools are “child-
centered institutions in contrast to the teacher-
centered and principal-centered schools of the
conventional order.”
• Second, Learner-centered schools are organized
around the needs and interests of individuals
rather than the demands of the school subjects.
• Third, learner centered schools orient themselves
around the needs and interests of the children
rather than around parental expectations for their
children.
 The Activity School
• The activity school is a school full of activity,
a school where experience is the medium
through which individuals grow and learn, a
school where, indeed, “experience is the
keynote of education.”
• Knowledge comes through the interaction of
an individual with the surrounding world, both
inanimate and social.
• “I know” is taken to be the slogan of the
traditional school.
• In contrast, “I have experienced” is the slogan
of the activity school.
The activity school program is based on based on
four practices:
• Firsthand experience with reality.
• Experience with physical materials and people
• Experience involving physical activity
• Experience inside and outside the classroom
 Firsthand Experience with Reality
• The activity school provide firsthand
experience with reality and avoid the
traditional school’s practice of providing only
secondhand experience through reading,
writing, listening and viewing.
 Experience with Physical Materials
and People
• Physical materials of both animate and
inanimate form are prominent in the activity
school.
• Children experience the growing of plants
firsthand in the activity school instead of
reading about them as they would in the
traditional school.
Experience Involving Physical Activity
• The ideal school is full of activity; physical,
verbal, social and emotional.
• It radiates the belief that healthy intellectual,
social and emotional growth must be
accomplished by physical and verbal activity.
 Experience Inside and Outside the
Classroom
• Activity school is designed to provide learners
with experiences that occur both inside and
outside the classroom.
• Teachers within the school frequently take
children outside the classroom and school to
explore phenomena within their everyday
natural and man-made world.
Overview and Examples

Kainat Mumtaz
 The Organic school
• Marietta Johnson was an educational reformer. She
founded a progressive school called the Organic
school.
• A school designed to further the natural growth of the
developing human organisms.
• It is organized to respect the inner movement of
growth of learners.
 The Traditional School
• The traditional system based on the acquisition of
knowledge through the division of learning according
to the age of the student.
• To achieve this increase in skills and knowledge, this
system relies on two fundamental axes such that:
“The professor and reference books”.
 Ways of Difference
• Organic school is different from the traditional school
in three ways:
 First because its curriculum is based on the natural
developmental growth of people rather than only
demands external to them
 It does not pressure people to acquire academic skills
and knowledge
 Organic school educators do not force children to
learn to read or write before their bodies and mind are
ready to voluntarily to do so.
• It is the task of the organic school to provide the
medium of growth-an intellectually rich physically
interesting,socialy humane, emotionally joyous
instructional environment for individuals to
experience.
• Second the organic school is different from the
traditional school because:
 it believe people evolve through a series of
qualitatively different growth stages as they develop
from infancy to adulthood
 The organic school views children as different from
adults, treat then differently and bases its curriculum
on the nature of children
 The organic school treats children as children and
provides them with childlike activities.
• Third the organic school is different from the
traditional school because:
 it believes Individual grow and Learn
intelectually,socially,emotionally,and physically in
their own unique and idiosyncratic ways and at their
own individual rates rather than in a uniform manner.
 The integrated school
The ideal school is an integrated school. It is integrated
in many ways:
• First it is integrated because
 Peoples are dealt in the way that they use all of their
attributes at a time .
 It takes a holistic view of personality that require one
to “look at the whole child” and deal with all of their
attributes simultaneously.
• Second it is integrated because:
 It integrate knowledge of school discipline.
 Integrated school don’t view knowledge as broken up
into separate disciplines
 The teacher’s job and the curriculum is to create
engaging different academic disciplines.
• Third it is integrated because:
 It has few fixed periods during the day when
particular event occur
 There will be fluidity in time during each event.
 Learner's begin active, end their involvement in
activities and move on to new activity when it feels
natural to them.
• Fourth it is integrated because:
 It attempts to integrate people’s home and school
lives.
 It create the sense that world is not fragmented into
isolated places of school and homes.
 Children bring their things and ideas from home to
school and the result is more fully integrated day.
Global Assumptions

Laiba
Definition of Assumption
An Assumption is something that you
assume to be the case, even without
Proof.
For example
people might make the assumption that
you’re nerd if you wear glasses, even
though that’s not true. Or very nice.
 Assumption of Learning theory
The learning theory underlying the learner
Centered ideology is
a form of constructivism.
An assumption if the learner Centered “approach
is that children constitute the basic resources of
the educational process. In contrast to those
educational theories which ‘assume’ the presence
of a child during instruction’”
The Lerner Centered “ approach ‘ requires’ the
presence of a child to define instruction”.
Learner Centered educators declare that
each individual learner must be the agent of
his or het own learning growth, education,
and life.

Insisting that individuals be independent,

self-reliant, self-actualizing learners who
are capable, on their won, of directing their
own growth.

Learner Centered educators to belief in

individualism
Assumption of Autonomy (freedom to act)
 Learner Centered educators belief in
freedom and individualism

school provides a setting in which students

are independent, are trusted and are
treated as responsible people

Child firmly decides doing what the teacher

thinks in best, the teacher often will make
the decision to honor the child’s position for
the time being this particular opportunity to
extend his understanding
Assumption of development viewpoint

 Two major assumptions underlying the work

of Learner Centered educators are that
people grow through distinctly different
developmental stages and that people’s
thoughts are different at different
developmental stages

 Whether the stages are psychological,

social, cognitive, or moral nature, people are
believed to evolve through a sequence of
qualitatively different development stages
from infancy
o Assumption of the person in an
Environment

o The potential for growth lies within people

. However, people grow their thoughts
develop and their thinking processes
evolve as a result of stimulation that their
interaction with their environment.
o Beliefs of Learning Leads to Knowledge

o Learner Centered educators are much less interested

in knowledge than they are in growth and learning .
Two important assumptions flow from these Beliefs.

o First , knowledge is a personal creation of

individuals who engage in learning by interacting
with their environment.

o Second, the knowledge the “child learners is not

only his but may well be his alone.
Historical Context

Laraib Israr
Progressive Education Association was founded in 1919
• On of its important contribution was the Eight-Year study, which
compared the effectiveness of learner centered and traditional
schools

After World War II development of learner centered ideology

halted

• The ideology was revived in about 1965 by National Science

Foundation (NSF).
• During the 1960s, the Elementary Science Study, funded by
NSF, provided energy for resurgence of the learner centered
ideology.
• It developed many physical manipulates (such as pattern blocks)
and instructional units (such as “batteries and bulbs”) consistent
with the project method. And it promoted open education.
Now we’ll take a look at some of the thinkers and ideas which
have been most influential on our current ideas about active
learning and effective learner-centered ideology.

Four early Europeans who contributed to the learner

centered ideology deserve mention
 John Amos Comenius (1592-1670)
• He emphasized that learning is developmental
and that it progresses from concrete experience
to abstract thought.
• He wrote that people learn by doing: “Artisans
learn to forge by forging, to carve by carving,
to paint by painting ,… learn children learn to
write by writing, to sing by singing, and to
reason by reasoning” (Comenius, 1657/1896,
pp. 100, 152).
Jean- Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
• Rousseau viewed children as naturally good and society as corrupt.
• He believed that education’s purpose is to nurture children's natural
goodness.
• Since children are naturally curious and good, intrinsic motivation in
a world full of rich experiences is what is needed to facilitate their
growth.
• Rousseau insisted that childhood is a unique and valuable stage of
life and should be nurtured, enjoyed, and not hurried through.
• Learning should proceed developmentally from direct experiences
with nature to sensory experiences with concrete objects to abstract
ideas.
• Children’s natural growth should be the focus of education.
 Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827)

• He emphasized that children should be free to explore

their own interests.
• Children draw their own conclusions, and have a role in
directing their own education.
• Johann advocated a balanced education that equalizes
concern for head, hands and heart.
• He emphasized children’s inner goodness and dignity that
we should educate children in an atmosphere of love and
kindness.
 Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852)
• He emphasized that education of children’s senses and
perceptions in ways that are playful, enjoyable, and
spontaneous.
• He invented “gifts” and “occupations” that allow children to
perceive the order and beauty of nature as a result of
interacting with it and acting on it.
• Gifts are structured physical manipulates that children can play
with and personally interact with.
• Occupations are creative materials that children can shape and
manipulate as they desire and include such things as clay,
sand, and paints.
• Froebel also emphasized the use of games, songs, stories, and
crafts.
• Theorists like John Dewey, G. Stanley Hall, Colonel
Francis W.
Parker, whose collective work focused on how students
learn, have informed the move to student-centered learning.
• Parker is best know for his desire to move children to the
center of education: his eagerness to nurture children’s
growth, to make school enjoyable places.
• Stanley ideas about the formation of the individual also
contributed to student-centered learning. Stanley wrote that
"the only learning which significantly influences behavior
and education is self discovered”.
• Dewey wrote that learning means something which the
individual does when he studies.
– Dewey believed that people come to understand
themselves and the world through their interactions with
other people and things in the world.
Evaluation

Aqsa Razzaq
 Assessment for growth
• In learner centered teachers assess learning
growth and interest by observing, recording and
documenting the learning progress.
• They can plan instrumental environmental which
students will learn and plan the way in which they
will facilitate student’s growth by interacting.
• They can revised to meet students development
needs, individual learning, characteristics and
interests.
• Assessment relies heavily on portfolio and direct
observation of students.
 Standardized objective testing
• Learning centered advocate opposed to
psychometric philosophy of education.
• It posits that learner possesses measurable
abilities.
• Learner centered advocate give the reason for
viewing standardized achievement
unfavorable.
• One reason is that students frequently understand
that they cannot verbalize as symbolic
expressions publicly displayable in a form that
they can be objectively assess on standardized
achievement test.
• Another reason is that the important thing such as
student’s self-concept, curiosity and initiative are
difficult to measure and while trivial things.
• Third reason is that taking and confronting the
results of standardized achievement test can have
negative effects on student’s learning.
 Grading
• Lengthy written reports describing children
development, learning and activity is the
preferred mode of providing.
• Letters and numeric grades re avoided because
it believes that learning should have intrinsic
value of learning.
• Learner centered ideology is necessity for
children how to evaluate their own learnings as
well as to earn.
 Student Evaluation
• Since 1880 G. Stanley Hall started the child
study movement, the preferred Learner
Centered methods of assessment through
teacher observation of student.
• Assessment include, for each student, portfolio
assessment, teacher notes, teacher student
diaries, development checklists, learning logs
and journals, student self-assessment, student
peer assessment.
 Characteristics of student assessment
• Learner centered take the value loading out of
evaluation.
• They want to remove the connotation of good or
bad, right or wrong, better or worse, from the
action of learner in order to help them make use
of their mistakes, or as well as their success.
• Lerner centered educators tend to view students as
whole and take an approach to assessment.
• Evaluation should not be separate technical issue,
conceptualized analyzed, and implemented
independent education.
 Curriculum Evaluation
• Learner centered educator have interest in curriculum
evaluation.
• Subjective formative evaluation of the curriculum. It
leads to improvement in the curriculum as being
developed.
• Evaluation is usually based on such as the degree
which learner involved with the curriculum.
• The findings of eight years study 1930s of Aiken and
Walberg research clearly indicate that children educated
in learner centered environment do as well as or better
than children educated in traditional classrooms.
 Conclusion
• Learner centered ideology is humanize education
over last century.
• Educational process belief that self-actualization
growth is the goal of education, teachers are
facilitators of learning, bringing attention the
importance of learning styles and including the
authentic assessment.
• The learner centered ideology gained greater
influence as part of the progressive education
association insisted that education must to the
needs and nature of child.