Page 7 - Learner Centered Teaching

Power Strategies

Strategies for gauging

 In order to create students who understand what it means to assess knowledge

critically, we need to provide opportunities for them to embrace their own

power and to question how power operates in the classroom. Here are a few

starting points.

 Have students participate in deciding how the classroom operates. Ask

them what types of learning and teaching works best for them.

 Write a Classroom Manifesto with students in the first week of class that

clearly outlines what you expect from them and what they can expect

from you.

Strategies for engaging

 Top-down power creates spaces where students feel disempowered. To engage

students in the classroom, create a safe space for engagement.

 Interactive, anonymous slide platforms can help even the shiest students

have a voice in the classroom.

 Provide students with opportunities to rewrite the syllabus. Empower

them to propose alternative timelines, assignments or weightings that

work within the pedagogical/practical limits you set.

 Use welcoming and open language in the syllabus or Learning

Management System (LMS) that you use.

 Critically assess your own ‘rules’ and ask yourself who these rules serve.

Do they serve to assert convention and control or pedagogy and

possibility?