Another principle of the child-centered classroom is that children learn best when they help construct their own knowledge. From the standpoint of pedagogy, this is probably the idea that most distinguishes child-centered education. It’s what changed the configuration of the classroom from desks facing the teacher to large tables where the children face one another.
Knowledge that arises from their own active inquiry, or problem solving, or exploring, or questioning, or discovering is said to be more firmly fixed in the mind than mere information that a child passively receives from a teacher’s lecturing. Young teachers-to-be are told: “Don’t be a sage on the stage. Be a guide on the side.”
MICHELE: Another child-centered idea when I was teaching first grade was that idea of centers—work centers for students, right?
You put these centers in place so that children could explore.
There were literacy and math centers, so I had this 180-minute block. That’s a lot of minutes for a young child to be exploring. I don’t even think I wrote lesson plans the first three years that I was a child-centered teacher, because I spent all this time creating these independent work centers with the kids.
And so they moved from one center to another and I had a bell and after fifteen minutes I would ding it and they would move to
the next one. After five minutes they were done, and there was usually mass chaos ensuing, so then I would have to create more centers because I knew that the kids could maintain attention for only five to seven minutes. So there I was on the weekends at school, creating twenty-five centers. I had this graph of a
movement system to get the kids to move through, and then at the end of the day I would be exhausted.
And you know there was no depth to any of it. You know, we’d say, “Let’s make words.” Well, how does a child make words when a child doesn’t know how to read? And I was saying to myself, “There just has to be an easier way,” but I was too young in the profession. You know, we were coming through those days of “invented spelling” [in which] it doesn’t matter how they spell, because someday they will get it.
I tried to teach my standards through their interests. So my guided reading centers might be like this: In this center we were building words about spiders. In this center we were reading a reading passage and answering questions about butterflies. In this center we were watching a video. In this center, which was my guided reading center, I might have leveled texts [books at different levels of challenge] about spiders.
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EDH: Cathy, could you say a little bit about centers. What was the idea of these centers and how did they actually work?
CATHY: The idea behind the centers was that you were able to differentiate, to meet students where they were and to take them as far as they could.
EDH: What does a center actually look like?
CATHY: It could look different in different classrooms. A center, basically, is a small group of students working on an activity together. Oftentimes they were student generated, in that there would not be a teacher working with them. To meet the needs of students, you couldn’t give them whole-group instruction. So you broke it down into small, manageable groups, with hopefully
pretty high-interest activities so students would maintain engagement throughout them, even though you were not right there watching them.
[AUTHOR’S NOTE: There could not be a whole-class discussion, because the background knowledge of each child was so unpredictably different, largely because their prior classes had been on different individualized topics.
Hence, there was no possibility of a successful speech community in the class.]
EDH: In a way, they were teaching themselves at these centers.
CATHY: Correct, yes.
EDH: Because the teacher couldn’t deal with the whole class, because there was such varied background among the students?
CATHY: Correct. The teacher was usually at the reading center,
where students were reading leveled books. So you were working on reading skills and comprehension while the other students were working on different tasks related to a standard, but again, hopefully high-interest enough that it was engaging to them and it would maintain their attention for fifteen minutes. And then they would switch.
EDH: How did you prepare? You’re preparing for the class to come in, and so how do you prepare who goes where and, physically, what do the centers look like?
CATHY: It took a lot of preparation time. I would make games or find videos. At one point in my classroom I was lucky that we had [a place] where kids could watch a video and then I could create questions right after the video and they could record their
responses to the questions. There would be a file folder of games.
EDH: So how many centers would there typically be?
CATHY: Most of the time it would depend on how many students you had in your classroom, because I always wanted somebody to have a partner. The idea of the centers is to generate some student involvement with each other. So if I was teaching twenty-five
students, you really never wanted more than five. It could be anywhere, honestly, from four to six centers that I had going in my classroom at the same time.
EDH: So, a lot of this, the interaction between the students, would be students teaching themselves. Have I got the picture right? Since it’s not teacher directed.
CATHY: No, it’s not teacher directed. . . . There are times I would have a listening station where they would put headphones on and follow along with a book. Or there would be books about
[specific] topics. We just didn’t know what kind of conversations were happening over there in the centers. I was hoping for the most part that they were talking about the text that they were supposed to be reading or they were pulling some meaning from it. As long as they did not attract undue attention by being
completely off task, that allowed me to work with my students at my current small group.
EDH: I see.
CATHY: Kind of terrible, huh?