In this summary of a document written by McCombs and Wishler, we can see their 12 principles of student-centered learning. The principles proposed are:
1. The nature of the learning process: both authors affirm that the learning process is a conscious and volunteer process in which students will not only learn what is taught, but they should do it while being engaged. Therefore, letting students being aware of this process and helping them to set their goals and offering engaging activities, will help to awake our students’ interest on learning but also to be occupied in full commited activities.
2. Goals of the learning process: once the students set their goals, as teachers we should try to see if the goals are achievable, once we know that, we should be aware that the activities we are offering to each and every student are appropriated for their learning style, but also appropriated to their goals. Therefore we must offer challenging activities based in logic more than memorization.
3. The construction of knowledge: while learning, students will relate the new knowledge to their previous knowledge, that is why we should offer information and concepts that are related in some way to their previous knowledge, just to challenge these or to enlarge them. Students then, will make connections and structures in their brains in order to organize and simplify the new information.
4. Higher order thinking: while we (teachers) allow students to build their own knowledge, they should acquire strategies to confront these new concepts, in that case we should offer them the possibility to question the new knowledges with essential questions that will make them reflect on what they’re learning, but we should also allow them to discuss about these new concepts with their classmates in order to build a common knowledge or just to clarify the difficulties he/she may have with this new knowledge. Nonetheless if our students are good at working by themselves, we should offer them the tools to assess and analyze the new concepts.
Motivational influences on learning: while students are into a learning process, their motivation and mood will influence them to reach a higher or lower level of knowledge. In this case, we can see that this motivation has 4 key factors: behavioural, humanistic, cognitive and sociocultural. Behavioural is reinforced by punishing or rewarding the student, the humanistic is determined by a need of confidence, self-esteem, self-fulfillment and self-determination; the cognitive is related to the idea of success or failure and expectations, students will try to achieve as much as they can but being realistic, in this process they can succeed or fail; and finally sociocultural is related to being part of a community and create links with them by sharing knowledge so the individual could fit into a group.
6. The intrinsic motivation to learn: all students love the feeling of learning and need to learn in order to feel more realised, but teachers must be careful of the students level because if they’re doing something too complicated for them, this can lead into a demotivational situation, that’s why if teachers are aware of their students’ knowledge, interests and capabilities then they can scaffold the new knowledges in order to reach each and every student and adapt them to pupils.
7. Characteristics of motivation-enhancing learning tasks: in this case teachers should focus their attention on motivating students by testing their creativity, judgement and reflection. Challenging students with logical activities that are adapted to every level will challenge and encourage students to trust their judgment and to avoid the outside poisonous ideas while taking profit of the elaborated ones.
8. Developmental constraints and opportunities: students are determined by physical capabilities and environmental ones, therefore each and every child’s knowledge is different. With that being said, students must adapt to every student’s intelligence and style of learning to help them to reach their goals and limits.
9. Social and cultural diversity: while in class, group activities and debates can help students to create more complex knowledges, that’s why students need the cooperation of their classmates by sharing information and helping each other, but to reach that point, they must learn that respecting and being tolerant with the opinion of the other students can help them to grow as individuals but also to grow as a united group in which there is a relationship of equality among their members.
10. Social acceptance, self-esteem and learning: while working in group, students must not only reinforce their own self-esteem and learning process, but also reinforce these two points towards their classmates, that’s why respecting each other and helping each other will facilitate that task to them being all benefited from this situation. Furthermore giving feedback of this learning process will help students to be conscious of their situation and which changes they should do or even which attitudes they should continue practising.
11. Individual differences in learning: as it is said early on in the text, students capabilities are determined by their environment and their inheritance, therefore we must consider the multiple intelligences we can find in class and adapt to them.
12. Cognitive filters: so to sum-up all these, teachers in class will find a group of individuals that are conditioned by their previous knowledge, beliefs and environment that will acquire as important the knowledge they need to reach their goals. With these factors students will create their own personal knowledge based also in their learning styles to which teachers will adapt in order to facilitate and reach every children’s needs by using specific tools, methodologies .
So once we know all this, we should realise that students should be formed in three areas: as individuals, into interaction and integration (individualisation and socialisation process). Therefore they must know not only academical concepts but also how to teach these concepts depending on the needs of the class and the subject. So, classroom management is essential to learn more time to students to increase their concepts, to have access to more information and to help students to develop their self-management. Once they know that they can set their goals and achieve them. Individual assessment is also very important to reach every child’s needs. Finally we must make our students the center of the learning process, offering them the TIC resources when it’s appropriated but using them in a formative way and not only because this methodology is frequent in today’s educational system.
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