Don’t throw the dishes out with the water

February 10, 2026

The other day I was reading Teaching Effectively with ChatGPT, a helpful book that I recommend. One of the things I appreciate about the book is that the authors, Dan Levy and Angela Pérez Albertos, start with pedagogy, not technology. Their first principle is "be student-centered."

I found this principle comforting, since student-centered teaching (or learner-centered teaching - LCT) has become part of our "best practices," to the extent that there are best practices in teaching and learning. There is now a wide literature on LCT. According to Maryellen Weimer's 2013 book on the topic, LCT focuses more on student learning than instructor performance, gives students choices (Weimer writes "control") in the learning process, involves collaboration between students and between students and instructor, includes student reflection on learning (and how to learn), and includes instruction in learning skills, not just in content. LCT tends to promote active and collaborative learning and emphasizes a constructivist approach to learning over a banking model of knowledge transmission. If you are looking for a snappy way to summarize learner-centered teaching, look no further than Alison King’s 1993 article "From Sage on the Stage to Guide on the Side": Instructors do not have to lecture from the podium, they can be learning facilitators that help students achieve their educational goals.

Instructor-centered teaching (ICT), in contrast, focuses on the instructor as the holder of expertise in a particular field, who provides students with learning goals, presents content (facts, concepts, and skills) and instruction in actively using content, assigns exercises and activities that enable students to learn the material, and tests the degree to which they attain the set learning goals. The classic ICT approaches are lectures, exams, but also various forms of question posing, seminar discussion, practice assignments, and the like. The main difference is that ICT focuses on content delivery by the instructor and content acquisition by the students, while LCT focuses on learner interests, goals, and preferred practices.

There is good evidence that LCT is generally more effective than ICT. This is intuitive: If students are to learn something, we need to use their expertise about what motivates them, what interests them, how they learn well, etc. to craft effective, engaging learning activities. Much of the programming that the CFI teaching team has offered, and will be offering, is informed by learner-centered teaching approaches. Stay tuned.

Here I want to take the opportunity to defy the trend and turn again to an instructor-centered approach. I think ICT does (and should) still play a role in our teaching; we have to make sure that we do it well.

There are several reasons for not discarding an ICT: First, the evidence in favor of LCT, while generally supportive, is not unanimously strong. There are studies (here an example) that do not find it to be better. Its effectiveness seems to be culturally contingent. Teaching is still an art, and (sadly) best practices may not be best under all circumstances.

Second, while student-centered learning activities are important, they have to build on a basis of understood facts and disciplinary practices; if we want students to apply knowledge, they first have to understand it. If we want them to identify what questions about a topic they are interested in, they have to have a sense of what questions are out there. If we want them to provide input on assessments, they need to know something about the learning goals, and how they can be achieved, and how that achievement can be documented, which in turn again requires a certain knowledge basis about the subject matter as well. And sometimes students simply need clear explanations, as a colleague commented to me, that they cannot generate on their own. From a student-centered perspective, one example recommendation is Just-In-Time Teaching, usually involving pre-class readings or videos, in-class mini-lectures, and the like — instructor-centered elements.

Third, I want to honor Parker Palmer's call to discover who we are as teachers. Some of us are better learning facilitators, others are captivating lecturers (and all of us can become better at either, I suspect). Students often benefit if we are role models as learners and teachers. All of this suggests that ICT, whether as an element in otherwise learner-centered environments or on its own, can play an important role.

Fourth, much of our own learning, as academics, comes from "sages on stages" (or, rather, pages), less from group-level active learning opportunities (unless you come to a CFI workshop, of course!). It seems important to introduce students to such a common approach to learning — and to how to do it well — if we want them to become life-long learners. Reading and listening for longer periods of time, making sense of complex presentations (in print or voice), developing critical questions and counter-arguments, all of these skills are important to learn, especially in times of shrinking attention spans.

One common objection (which I sometimes make myself) is that academics are simply different types of learners. We are different from our students in that we voluntarily spent a decade of our lives in (relative or absolute) poverty (and often accumulating student debts) in order to become experts on some more or less obscure topic. This is true, but I don't believe that the way instructors tend to learn is only good for nerds like us, not for “regular people” out there. We are practiced learners, if nothing else, and we should be able to teach our students how to learn like we do.

How can we do ICT (or teacher-centered elements in otherwise learner-centered teaching) well? Here, I am thinking mostly about what are probably the two most common instructor-centered approaches: Lectures and readings, but at least some of the points below should be applicable to other "sage on the stage" approaches as well.

• Be purposeful. Why do you employ instructor-centered teaching? Do you want to provide students with examples of important questions that will structure their learning? Do you need to provide expert content, such as clear explanations, for them to build on? Do you want to provide high-level overviews that enable students to embed more detailed facts? Do you want to serve as a role model? Or what? If you cannot find a good answer, another educational approach may be better.
• Based on the identified purpose(s), determine when and where you come in. In the classroom or in online lectures? At the beginning of the semester, to lay foundations, or later on, when students have been able to develop their own interests?
• If you lecture, use good lecturing practices. For example, Washington University’s Center for Teaching and Learning has a good guide on creating effective lectures. There’s also Donald Bligh’s classic What’s the Use of Lectures? (though the library has only one hardcopy of it), a great resource about all kinds of aspects of lecture pedagogy (and its limitations).
• Make it (inter)active. Lori Gano-Overway's recent-ish toolbox on lectures includes excellent suggestions for creating effective lectures as well as including pauses for active learning. Back in 2017, Emily Gravett published a toolbox on Interactive Lecturing with a number of helpful resources that outline the debate around lectures. 
• Teach students how to learn. If we want students to learn how to pay attention, listen, take good notes, and ask good questions, we have to teach them how to do these things, and we have to give them opportunities to practice. Teaching students to take better notes from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is a helpful resource. McGuire's Teach Students how To Learn is also a good source of strategies. Lori Gano-Overway’s toolbox that I mentioned above also contains suggestions for how to pause a lecture and help students process it. Asking students to compare their lecture notes and identify main points that they should remember is a fairly easy activity that gives instructors the opportunity to identify and correct misconceptions.
• If we want students to read effectively, we have to teach that as well. Lori Gano-Overway (Kinesiology and CFI) offered a workshop on this topic last semester; among the resources she pointed to were several helpful resource pages and blog posts from teaching and learning centers.
• Make it accessible: There is a lot of overlap between what’s considered good lecturing and what makes lectures accessible, as this guide from Ontario’s (Canada) Universities shows. In addition to a clear structure and good pacing (such as regular breaks after about 20 minutes), recommendations include using a microphone (especially in larger classes) even if you think your voice carries (it doesn’t), making slides available to students (and designing them in an accessible manner, for example following this JMU guide), describing and explaining all images, and employing a range of presentation modalities (text, images, voice, etc.). Also, you may want to consider how more general recommendations on supporting neurodiversity apply.

A colleague who commented on a first draft of this toolbox noted that this looks very much like student-centered active learning. She pointed out that student- and instructor-centered teaching happens on a continuum. I think that's right; if we do it well, instructor-centered and student-centered teaching are closely connected. Good teaching happens in a triangle that is formed by the instructor, the student, and the discipline (which includes content as well as disciplinary practices of content production). At times, instructor-centered teaching is appropriate, when professors profess, when they lay out their knowledge, their experiences in an academic field, welcome students in to the excitement and joy that they encounter in their work. Sometimes, content dominates the teaching, never mind whether it's instructor- or student-centered. And sometimes, of course, learner-centered teaching is appropriate, as students make the knowledge their own, learn how to apply content to practical contexts and problems, and do all the good things up and down the ranks of the various Bloom taxonomies. Let’s use it all!