Teachers Are Engaging Learners Too

Presenter: Ronald (Ron), J. Chenail, Ph.D., Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, Professor of Family Therapy

Description: The simplest way for us as educators to embrace a learner-centered pedagogy is to act as learners along with our students. This identify can be difficult because of years of training and experiences can influence us to separate ourselves as learners from our teaching activities. Serving as “Sages on Stages” and even “Guides of the Sides” can rob us as faculty from the sheer joys and rewards as learners and students from learning along with us as co-learners. In other words, we can help our students learn not by being hierarchical teachers as experts (i.e., being purveyors of privileged knowledge and arbiters of what constitutes learning through testing), but by being learners ourselves in the presence of their learning students (i.e., researching in our research classes, learning from our students’ learning, encouraging students to learn from each other, and maybe most importantly, learning with our students). The process begins by re-engage yourself as a learner while you teach.