Dena Budrecki's List: Student Centered Learning

• Unfortunately, most of our students get a steady diet of force-fed information and test taking strategies. We're giving a generation of kids practice for predictable, routine procedures - and that happens across the "bell curve" from AP test prep to meeting minimal proficiency on NCLB-mandated tests.
• School mission statements claim to foster "life-long learning," but walk in most classrooms and you'll see students hard at work on a task that's been scripted by their teacher. Most likely they're working to replicate a final product that's already been prescribed (with rubrics) by their teacher.
• reflect on their progress.
• "How can I stop scaffolding every task for students, and have the courage to be less helpful?"
• I think students have been taught that they work for the teacher and the grade
• “Student-Directed Learning Comes of Age: Teachers Adopt Classroom Strategies to Help Students Monitor Their Own Learning” by Dave Saltman in Harvard Education Letter, July/August 2011 [
• Choice – Ideally,
• Accountability
• Self-assessment
• Self-efficacy

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• e has come back a

• If [students] are learning, that's what we care about."
• Academic coaches circled the room, leaning over to help students when they raised their hands.
• "I had a perfect record throughout the whole year in 9th grade, and there was no challenge," she said. "It felt kind of like cheating."
• Now that she's starting her second year at SF Flex, she said she no longer has straight A's, but "it doesn't feel like I am cheating. It feels like I earned it."
• "In a public school system, you're in a classroom and the teacher is always pushing you, so you never really have to push yourself much,"
• Students receive incentives, such as permission to have lunch off campus, for rounding the bases and making significant progress, she said.
• The flex model encourages and empowers students to take control of their own learning, even at a young age, according to Ms. Keybl.

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