Decentering the Teacher

The university classroom long has been dominated by teacher-centered instruction, which has shown some adaptability while retaining its fundamental characteristics. It wasn’t until the late 20th century that this approach faced significant challenges, as evidence-based practices and learning sciences began to inform educational methods. Understanding this transition requires examining the extensive history of teacher-centered education, including the influence of global pedagogical traditions and the effects of industrialization and technological advances.

Throughout educational history, our understanding of how children and young adults learn has continuously evolved. For centuries, this understanding remained notably one-dimensional, failing to account for the complexity of human learning. Prior to the 20th century in most parts of the world children were either seen as blank slates or miniature adults, requiring little more than information and discipline as they matured. Philosophers in the 1700s described children as possessing a natural goodness or in need of stern training. But it wasn’t until the early 1900s that Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget began charting children’s “stages” of maturity.[i]  From this would emerge understandings of how youngsters transition from self-centeredness into social beings, eventually acquiring capacities to actively “construct” knowledge rather than passively taking it in. These insights about cognition and learning would eventually underlie the fields of child development and “child-centered” education. 

Yet even as these progressive educational theories were evolving, families and educators continued to prefer traditional instruction, owing to “common sense” resemblances of teaching to parenting in activities like establishing routines, setting expectations, imparting knowledge, and providing feedback. These resemblances make teacher-centered instruction feel familiar and natural, especially in K-12 years. This broad-based appeal speaks to a deep-seated human desire for guidance and a reverence for wisdom embodied in the teacher figure. But as any teenager will tell you, such methods can become counterproductive over time as learners develop levels of independence and autonomy, requiring less and less supervision, direction, and monitoring.  Failure to recalibrate instruction to the maturing learner can lead to stress, resentment, and underperformance in what educators term “resistance.”[ii]

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