CHAPTER 8 Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice

Responding to Resistance

When students and some teachers do not agree with the learner-centered approach because they prefer conventional teaching methods, we are referring to resistance. It can occur becuse these kind of activities require a lot of time to carry out and sometimes are not appropriate for the students´level. Thus, the purpose of this chapter is to help teachers to deal with this resistance and how to realize if there is resistant from students and colleages. First, some of the reasons of students resistance are mainly four: it does not give immediate benefits, it requires more work, learner-centered approaches are threatening, these approaches involve losses and finally students are not ready for these approaches. Also, the ways of how to recognize resistance are shown into three main categories. The passive, non verbal resistance involves a lack of enthusiam, excuses when the teacher asks students to do an activity, so this resistance is about students´behavior. The partial compliance refers to do a task poorly and quickly. Open resistence means students convey the message clearly. In addition, teachers can use some communication strategies to overcome this issue of resistance. For example, explain the rationale behind what teachers ask students to do any task. However, this resistance can affect teachers who can not stand on the complaining. Moreover, faculty resistance is also presented as a big issue. Some teachers resist because the learner-independence  involves risk and no all of them are prepared to take it, also this approach reduces the amount of content in courses and so on. But it is posible to arouse interest of teachers about this approach and in this way deal with faculty resistance using some strategies, such as using the autonomy of the classroom and presenting envidence of the impact of the use of these approaches.

References:

• Spratt, M., Pulverness, A., & Williams, M. (2011). The TKT course. Ernst Klett Sprachen.The TKT course. Module 1,2,3

• Weimer, M. (2002). Learner-centered teaching: Five key changes to practice. John Wiley & Sons.

• Romani, P. (2013). Student-Centered Learning (21st Century Education) [Video]. Avaliable from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2N1I6sOhDiw

• Chaela (2013). From the Teacher-Directed to the Student-Centered classroom [Video]. Avaliable from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P09PvuX6xQo