#student-centred learning

I’ve spent years moving between classrooms, teacher-training sessions, and mentoring conversations with school leaders. No matter where I go, a private school in Karachi, a public school workshop in South Punjab, or an online teacher circle, the same concern keeps surfacing: our children can memorise, but can they think critically? This reflection grows out of that discomfort. It is not an…

As educators, we are used to being in front of a class.  I remember a colleague telling me how teaching was akin to giving a stage performance – the proverbial “sage on the stage”! And the more we teach, the more we occupy the centre stage and become the hub around which learning revolves in spite of our proclaimed affection for “student-centred learning”.

The JLA Lesson Structure

Many of the posts that I have written on this blog so far deal with specific parts of the lesson planning process or specific scenarios encountered in the teaching process. All of these different elements, however, are components of an overarching structure, which is what I’ll be writing about here.

This post will introduce and describe the lesson structure that I use when I teach and that I…

If students designed their own schools...

The best small town in America experiments with self-directed learning at its public high school. A group of students gets to create their own school-within-a-school and they learn only what they want to learn. Does it work? Charles Tsai finds out by spending a week with the Independent Project.