Learner-Centered Pedagogy: Considerations for Application in a Didactic Course

A learner-centered teaching approach is well known in higher education but has not been fully addressed within counselor education. Instructors who adopt this approach value a collaborative approach to teaching and learning, one that honors students' wisdom and contributions. Teachers create a learning environment encouraging students to actively engage in and take ownership of their learning experiences, an environment inspiring students to think deeply about how they might apply what they are learning to their future practice. It may be particularly challenging for counselor educators to incorporate learner-centered teaching strategies into didactic courses that are traditionally heavy in content versus smaller experiential courses such as practica and internships. In this article, learner-centered teaching is described, and a case study demonstrates how a learner-centered approach may be applied to a traditionally didactic counseling course.Keywords: pedagogy, teaching, learner-centered, counselor education, didacticFor the past decade, there has been a call in higher education for a shift from teacher-centered methods of instruction to learner-centered pedagogy (Brown, 2003; Crick Harris Shepard Stinchfield, 2006), rather than comprehensive approaches toward teaching that are helpful for engaging student learning. Yet several pedagogies are present in the counselor education literature such as contextual teaching (Granello, 2000), constructivist pedagogy (Nelson & Neufeldt, 1998), experiential teaching approaches (Grant, 2006), and transparent counseling pedagogy (Dollarhide, Smith, & Lemberger, 2007). These authors have described alternative and innovative methods for engaging student learners.Teaching practices such as contextual teaching, constructivist pedagogy, experiential teaching approaches and transparent counseling pedagogy share commonalities with, and reflect certain ideals of, learner-centered pedagogy. We believe that learner-centered pedagogy could represent an overarching theoretical umbrella, under which previous teaching practices presented in the counseling literature could represent different forms of learner-centered instruction. In this way, learner-centered pedagogy may serve as a conceptual framework that educators can use to provide an impactful learning experience for counseling students.We provide a brief description of the learning needs of counselor education students based on the demands they will face working as professional counselors, followed by an explanation of how learner-centered pedagogy may ultimately help professional counselors meet these demands. A case study is then presented to demonstrate how learner-centered pedagogy was applied in a couples counseling class. …