
Student Led Classrooms
Who Is Responsible For The Learning In Your Classroom?
Student Centered Learning-It All Begins With the Teacher!
4 Specific Goals of Student Led Instruction
1. The students are able to understand what they are learn in the greatest detail possible.
2. Empower a student with their learning; and a sense of pride and accomplishment.
3. Allows teachers to see what their students do and don’t know, what they fully understand, and where the teacher need to fill in the gaps of their learning.
4. Improve a student’s oral communication skill.
How To Create a Student Lead Classroom
- Asking quality questions and teaching your students to do that. This is “making the question do the work.” Use Bloom's Question strategies to teach students the language and process of quality questioning. (Effective Questions For Teachers and Students: Helping Students Think Deeply) That should be the foundation for teacher questioning, as well as their own.
- Student-led discussions. Teacher models effective discussion leader practices and points them out. Then hands that role over to students.
- Student evaluations of each other. Students evaluate and give feedback. The teacher is no longer the only grader…Students become responsible for an evaluation piece.
- Student feedback to each other. Students to give feedback to other students during discussion, such as vocabulary, adding details, and asking probing questions.
- Socratic seminars. This practice transfers ownership to students.
- Structures. A student-led classroom has many structures, routines, and procedures that are hidden, but essential and they are the foundation. For example, students must have rubrics and models to give quality feedback to each other.
- Teacher language. “Listen to your colleagues.” “We honor all voices in here.” “Talk to each other, not me.” “There are 24 teachers in this room.” Language like this converts students from passive unbelievers to active owners of their own leadership qualities.