Whether I am working with children or adults, pre-service or in-service teachers, undergrads or grads, my instruction and lesson plans vary based on the needs of the group and the individuals within the group. I normally present myself as a fellow learner in the classroom, and it is a mentality I truly believe in. I am constantly learning. Not because I am a teacher, but because I am human. Things change, new knowledge is developed, and therefore, as humans we all continue to learn and grow, even if not purposefully or consciously. I want my students to understand that they do not NEED me to learn. They need to learn to learn. They are resourceful and there are many resources available. Generally, I consider my classroom to be more student-centered than teacher-centered. My students learn by collaboration, researching, compiling, discussing, experimenting, evaluating, analyzing, synthesizing, forming opinions, and bringing it back to the group. They own what they are learning. And, I get to learn along the way. Does that mean I never have a more teacher-centered moment? Of course not. I am, after all, presumably the most experienced in the room. As such, I have a stronger foundational knowledge bank to draw from, and at times I have to use my leadership role and experience to direct, facilitate, and to provide mentorship.
My teaching philosophy is to approach instruction based on a number of factors including what my final objectives are, what I know about my students as a group and as individuals, and my resources including time and materials. If rote memorization is necessary, students must concretely understand what and why, and how it ties into conceptual understandings. I believe that in order for learning to occur, a student must interact (observationally, physically, cognitively, reflectively, emotionally) with what is being learned and with what has already been learned, preferably through collaboration with their peers so that vicarious experiences via those interactions can be shared between collaborators, and learning is multiplied and reinforced for all.
As an undergrad, preparing to fulfill my only ambition since Kindergarten, as my mother claims, I learned very little about student-centered versus teacher-centered learning environments. That is NOT a critique of my alma mater, but rather an indication of the times, in my opinion.
I was raised with and learned to become a teacher during the reigning popularity of cognitive learning theories. An improvement over simple and isolated behaviorist or objectivist teaching approaches, I suppose, but 90% of my classes were lecture based, seemingly disconnected from anything else I’d learned, and thus, predominantly non-student centered. Many connections I discovered years later, when I began teaching. I learned my facts from my teacher. Period. She (almost always) was the expert, and I, along with all my peers, was the learner.
In college, I was taught to teach in alignment with the ways I’d been taught as a child with newer methods of course, but maintaining the status quo power dynamic of teacher and student. I don’t remember the term “student-centered” coming up, and it had been around since Rogers coined it in 1971, when I was but two years old. The closest we came to mentioning any type of progressive movement was in our mostly critical discussions about Montessori schools. “Let me get this straight. You mean, the children decide what, when, and how they learn…individually?” In hindsight, I realize that the critique was entirely reflective of our instructors’ opinions.
By the way, that public school status quo mentality wasn’t stated per se, but rather, it simply existed. I took it with me as a teacher and for the first several years of my career, I maintained that belief, in part because I was expected to. Even though, in some ways, I was adapting my teaching to meet the needs of my students without realizing that was what I was doing. For example, I mastered identifying, adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing fractions. But conceptually, I didn’t really understand it or could visualize it, until I prepared to teach it. It dawned on me that my students might not either. By the time we were done with the fractions unit, my students did. We used blocks to represent various problems, we drew and colored Fraction Bob, we played games, looked for real-life samples, etc. Then we did the worksheets! 
What I wasn’t doing yet was individualizing those approaches. Some of my students didn’t need all the conceptual based activities. It was a few years more before I began having some students do Fraction Bob and work with manipulatives, while others could choose an activity to illustrate their understanding of fractions, such as creating a fractions board game.
It really wasn’t until I began my grad work through online courses at The University of Texas schools that I really came to understand the terms “student-centered” and “teacher-centered,” which I had by then at least heard of, if not truly absorbed. The progressive ideals from Dewey and others made sense to me. We learn through experience, not rote memorization. We build or deconstruct and rebuild from what we already know. The older we get and the more experience we have, the less often we build from a totally new foundation. The progressive movement is derived from a pragmatic philosophy on reality, and its existence based on experience and/or observation.
While I do believe the pragmatic philosophic ideals that reality is derived from experience and/or observation, I am not a blank slate believer. I do think we have varying capacities and needs based on a number of factors besides educational quality and quantity, including genetics and environment, the latter of which creates the most foundational experience from which we attempt to build knowledge. The culture and discourse we garner from our environments lay the path for how we approach learning and intake of new knowledge.
I spent the next several years working on two online master’s degrees and teaching. I often found myself in conflict with my fellow elementary teachers. “Student-centered” instruction was often misunderstood, and most found that deviating at all from the textbooks, or even the teacher led instruction they were used to, would render their students not ready for the state test. I did find that as I delved further into my grad work, that the teachers were doing some differentiation and student centered activities, but I still didn’t dare use the “student-centered” phrase. I find this to be true at higher education as well. Some immediately align the term with discovery learning and finding that too extreme, too unstructured, too chaotic, deem all of student-centered approaches useless all the while incorporating individual learning activities and authentic style assessments! The problem works the other way as well, unfortunately. I’ve heard way too many claim they are progressive, student-centered instructors, who never deviate from their standard, 10-year-old lectures.
I believe in the student, the individual student and the group(s) he/she belongs to. I learned a long time ago that the needs of students within a single classroom could vary greatly. I believed in differentiation long before I heard the term.
For example, in my early years of teaching, I remember many conversations around phonics versus whole-language instruction. I was a phonics baby. But one of the few things to shift when I was taught to teach, was the rising popularity of whole language. By the time I’d been teaching for a few years, phonics was rolling back around. Honestly, I believe that all students should have some basic working knowledge of phonics, and I believe some students absolutely need it to learn to read. However, some don’t. My middle son, who is extremely dyslexic, would not have fared as well without intensive phonics instruction. Meanwhile my older son and young daughter, who is just now learning to read, see a word once, are told what it is, and often never forget. She uses context clues to figure out the next word and where the story is going. But if I throw a nonsense word at her that follows a basic CVC pattern, she might not get it.
Then, there was the conceptual vs factual math debate. Personally, I think that every child needs to understand conceptually the idea of 3 baskets with 6 apples each and the resulting total number of apples. However, I also believe that children need to KNOW their multiplication facts. It is impractical to go through life without some factual knowledge base such as multiplication facts, identification of objects, dates of the most important historical events, etc. However, while some knowledge of facts is essential, today’s world allows for less reliance on fact and more on concept, when facts can be quickly accessed via the Internet. This allows for and necessitates the need for higher level thinking skills such as critical thinking, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluation for problem-solving and production.
During my years of teaching in K12, I began to deliver professional development, primarily in the area of technology integration in the classroom. I found that while adults needed some explicit guidance, they also needed to critically judge and evaluate how and why a new technology tool may or may not work for them. They had to have more than a basic foundational, working knowledge of the technology. But in order for that thinking to occur, it needed to be facilitated.
In teaching my online class with non-traditional undergrads, I have also found great variance in student needs. Some of my students are older, and others younger. Some, and this is independent of age, have more or less experience with technology in general. Some are scared to death of this new way of taking a class, while others feel it is no big deal. Some read and follow written directions, simply going through the exercises and contributing to the class and their groups as instructed, and others need clarification of those instructions several times a week via phone or text. Some walk away LOVING the format, and others swear they will never do it again and complain that they were forced to do it in the first place. Some students I talk to or communicate with daily, while others I hear only once in our single, synchronous videoconference. Some groups need expectation modifications, while others bound ahead finishing tasks ahead of time, and with its members finding strengths such as leadership or technological savvy-ness with a particular application.
Whether I am working with children or adults, pre-service or in-service teachers, undergrads or grads, my instruction and lesson plans vary based on the needs of the group and the individuals within the group. I normally present myself as a fellow learner in the classroom, and it is a mentality I truly believe in. I am constantly learning. Not because I am a teacher, but because I am human. Things change, new knowledge is developed, and therefore, as humans we all continue to learn and grow, even if not purposefully or consciously. I want my students to understand that they do not NEED me to learn. They need to learn to learn. They are resourceful and there are many resources available. Generally, I consider my classroom to be more student-centered than teacher-centered. My students learn by collaboration, researching, compiling, discussing, experimenting, evaluating, analyzing, synthesizing, forming opinions, and bringing it back to the group. They own what they are learning. And, I get to learn along the way. Does that mean I never have a more teacher-centered moment? Of course not. I am, after all, presumably the most experienced in the room. As such, I have a stronger foundational knowledge bank to draw from, and at times I have to use my leadership role and experience to direct, facilitate, and to provide mentorship.
My teaching philosophy is to approach instruction based on a number of factors including what my final objectives are, what I know about my students as a group and as individuals, and my resources including time and materials. If rote memorization is necessary, students must concretely understand what and why, and how it ties into conceptual understandings. I believe that in order for learning to occur, a student must interact (observationally, physically, cognitively, reflectively, emotionally) with what is being learned and with what has already been learned, preferably through collaboration with their peers so that vicarious experiences via those interactions can be shared between collaborators, and learning is multiplied and reinforced for all.