CRITICAL THINKING AND LEARNERS CENTERED LEARNING (A FREE SEMINAR)

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Teachers lecture and drill. Active integration of the students’ daily non-academic experience

is rare. Little time is spent stimulating students questions. Students are expected to receive knowledge given to them; they are not typically encouraged to doubt what they are told in the classroom, or what is written in their texts, students’ personal point of view or philosophies are considered irrelevant to education.

Classroom with teacher talking and students listening is the rule. Ninety percent of teacher questions require no more thought than recall. Dense and typically speed coverage of content is typically followed by content-specific testing. Inter- disciplinary synthesis is ordinary viewed as a personal responsibility of the student and is not routinely tested. Technical specialization is considered the natural goal of schooling and is correlated with getting a job. Few multi-logical issues or problems are discussed or assigned and even fewer teachers know how to conduct such discussions, or assess student participation in them. Students are rarely expected to engage in dialogical and dialectical reasoning.

Most teachers made it through their college classes by mainly learning the standard textbook answers and were never given an opportunity nor encouraged to determine whether what their text or the professor said was justified by their own thinking. As a result, predictable results will follow since students do not learn how to gather, analyze, synthesize and assess information. They do not learn how to recognize and define problems for themselves.

“Knowledge can be given to one who upon receiving it, knows it compared to “Knowledge must be created and in a sense, rediscovered by each learner”. Only if we see the contrast between these views clearly, will we be empowered to move from the former conception to the latter.