Efficient education

Achieving maximum productivity in education with minimum wasted effort or expense can be found on the continuum between ‘Teacher-centred education’ (as in teaching the entire class) and ‘Student-centred education’ (as when students are working independently). When you alternate between these two approaches to teaching, you appeal to all students. Every student sometimes needs guidance and is sometimes able to work on their own initiative.

Johan ‘t Hart – April 10, 2024

As a teacher you can look at education through different pairs of glasses. With one pair of glasses you see it as your job to take students by the hand. With the other perspective, you see it as your job to give students freedom and let them act independently. At the end of this blog I will discuss ‘multifocal glasses’.

First we look at the definition of Friendly and Fair Teaching of ‘Teacher centred education‘and ‘Student-centred education‘.

  1. With ‘Teacher-centred education’ a teacher determines the subject of the lesson and devises the learning objective and learning activities for the students.
  2. With ‘Student-centred education’ a teacher allows students to discover through play and gives students more influence on their learning process.

Why did I choose ‘Efficient education’ as a title for this blog? In my opinion, education is more efficient if both approaches to teaching receive alternating attention.

  1. Education is not efficient if a teacher mainly directs students and therefore offers students too little freedom to think along and make choices.
  2. Education is not efficient if the teacher mainly lets students take initiatives and therefore provides too little guidance.

Own experience with these two styles of teaching/learning

I have mainly taught teacher-centred music lessons at a secondary school for 34 years. When I talked about teaching music to colleagues from other subjects, I received two responses: “That seems like a difficult subject to me”, or: “Yes … the students like music”. With that last comment I got the feeling that they meant: “They generally do not like my subject” or more positively formulated: “You’re lucky, music is so much fun, it will be easy to motivate students.”

It is now impossible to determine what they meant. At the time that colleagues said this to me, I was providing ‘teacher-centred education’ and my students started to enjoy the subject of music more and more. I felt like an actor who could play with my audience. I could respond to their reactions. At first I enjoyed it, but after 20 years it started to bother me. Moreover, everything I offered to the students was always based on my initiative, I was in charge and that was tiring in a certain way. I now know that there are several disadvantages to ‘teacher-centred education’. See ‘Pitfall of teacher-centred education‘.

To keep things fair, I’m giving you all the same assignment: Climb this tree.

figure 35: Assessment

My experience as a child with education’.

Now follows an autobiographical part in which I show how learning came ‘naturally’ for me (with occasional support from teachers): My learning is playing.

Before I was six years old, I was given two instruments that I played on without sheet music: harmonica and recorder. I learned by trying, listening and remembering. When I turned six I started taking piano lessons. The teacher showed me how to read sheet music and instructed me to play it.

I have two older sisters. They were offered the same piano program as me, but two years earlier. I had often heard my sisters play the pieces I had to play. At some point while playing I discovered, “Hey, I know this piece,” and then I continued playing the piece as I remember it from my sisters. The piano teacher found that annoying, because according to him “I was just doing something”.

In other words: I was a student with a backpack that was filled in a different way. My piano teacher was unable to deal with my skills flexibly.

Nick Sorensen calls teachers who have a flexible approach to the different types of students in the classroom ‘improvising teachers‘. According to Sorensen there are four aspects to become an improvising teacher: Noticing, Dialogue, Connecting and Adapting.

After six years of piano lessons from my teacher who kept correcting me, I asked my mother if I could stop taking piano lessons. That was allowed and then I could ‘play’ again without being corrected by a teacher. The first task I set myself without a teacher was to play all the ‘Sinterklaas’ (Dutch Santa-Claus) and Christmas songs with melodies and chords in all keys.

My oldest sister heard me practicing and told the high school music teacher that I would soon be in his class. In the first lesson he took a test especially for me and then asked me if I wanted to ‘accompany the auditorium’ from now on. I liked doing that. From that moment on I could be compared to an organist in a church; an organist also accompanies singing. I was given the key to the auditorium so that I could practice on the large Bechstein grand piano before everyone arrived. The music teacher gave me sheet music of all the songs that were sung in the auditorium. That sheet music only contained the melody. I was allowed to come up with the chords myself. I was used to that from Sinterklaas and Christmas carols, so it worked. The music teacher also invited me to accompany singers on the piano during performances. At the end of my secondary school I organized a farewell performance for my music teacher.

Returning to ‘my learning is playing’: From the age of four to the age of 18, I taught myself to play music by heart, learned to play sheet music, and took advantage of the challenges offert on secondary school.  When I was 18, I decided to become a music teacher. For me the big question was: How do children develop in the field of music? With my own development as a reference, I have always looked for a model with which my students could learn in a similar way. At the conservatory I read the ‘Maxims of Murray Schafer’ in one of his thin books Schafer (1975). These maxims gave me guidance as a teacher.

Examine what movements you usually make. Come up with some new moves.

After 34 years I finally dare to set my students free

As a teacher, I wanted to set my students free, but I did not do so for fear of chaos. Only after 34 years did I make the leap from a teaching the entire class to giving students the opportunity to develop independently. That leap is big and my colleagues predicted that it would fail. From the first day I took this leap, my lessons went to my complete satisfaction. The concept of allowing students to work independently has been referred to by Friendly and Fair Teaching as: ‘student-centred education’. I now know (thanks to Biesta) that there are several disadvantages to the one-sided offering of ‘student-centred education’: See ‘Pitfall of student-driven education‘.

Through my experience I have discovered that both appoaches to teaching (teacher-centred and student-centred) require a specific touch from the teacher.

If information on this site is different for the two approaches to teaching, the information is split into two columns: ‘Teaching the entire class’ (teacher-centred education) in the left column and ‘Working independently’ (student-centred education) in the right column:

Teacher-centred education

Student-centred education

My advice to teachers and teachers in training is to first study the definition of both approaches to teaching (as FFT formulates it on this site). According to that definition, efficient education has two sides, two sides of the same ‘educational coin’.

After reading the definition, first examine what your current teaching style most resembles. Then use the information that suits your current teaching style. If you notice that your lessons are improving, you can then use the other side of the coin to appeal to all students. I am now convinced that the education coin has two sides and that both sides are necessary for efficient education. At the beginning of this blog I mentioned two pairs of glasses: In my opinion, a teacher with multifocal glasses, with which the teacher can blend both student-centred education and teacher-centred education, is able to optimally guide students.

One final note about the title: by “efficient” I mean that some students only need a little bit of support to then be able to continue on their own (that was my own experience as a child and what I saw the last three years teaching music). In my opinion, a teacher who tries to help students achieve as many goals as possible – not only pre-set goals, but also their own goals – is an efficient teacher. For one student, personal guidance by the teacher will take a lot of time and for another very little. In my opinion, being able to accurately assess whether you can let a student find his or her way or whether you need to provide the necessary help is the quality of an ‘improvising teacher‘.

This is a brief introduction. I hope it encourages you to want to find out more. Check out the materials on this website. Do you have any suggestions, get in contact through our contact page.