As part of an email discussion we are having about the mission statement of the new school of bidness, i stated the following:
It is my impression, and i could be off since i have very little first-hand knowledge of my colleagues’ classes, that most classes in the school are not student-centered. Student-centered means that the specific questions and interests of our students are at the heart of the course, not just in a few assignments, but at the center. If student-centered, we can lay out the principles of management, for example, but then we have to ask students to use these principles to manage something of their own choosing. In other words, it is the questions of individual–or collective in teams–students that drive what we do with the material. Our students are consumers of knowledge. By the time college students are juniors, we should be moving them to producers of knowledge and the only way to do that is when students apply the material to their own questions and experiences. The same way we do as scholars, just at a beginner level.
In the same email, talking about how we develop critical thinkers, i also said:
. . .my own students demonstrate that they do not know how to think critically. This is the only school i have been associated with, for example, where students rarely ever ask why we assign the things we do, why it is important to learn these things. i converse with my students all the time about this: Do they ever ask a prof why the prof believes lecturing and giving exams is the way to learn? They know it’s not, but they admit it rarely occurs to them to ask. What the prof says, goes, this is what they say they’ve been taught. This, of course, is also support for the fact that we are not student-centered. They HAVE to ask those questions. If students DID think critically, imagine how great our curricula would be?
My question is: How can you have student-centered learning where there is no student, that is, where students are not really interested in learning, rather are interested in doing what we want them to well enough to contribute to their GPA and advance toward the degree?
