Student-centred learning: how does it work in practice?

Aims: The aim of this study was to gather the opinions of teacher candidates and to find out their conceptions of student-centred learning. By means of this method, we desire to learn about the practical applications of student-centred learning in teacher training practices.

Participants: The participants of this study were 40 teacher candidates of the Teacher Training Programme for Primary Education who were in the last year of their study.

Methodology: The opinions of the teacher candidates were gathered through an instrument which had three open-ended questions. The written data were analysed by the two researchers using content analysis of the written opinions of the teacher candidates.

Results: According to the findings of this research, although teacher candidates have gained knowledge about student-centred learning, the teaching-learning processes were not organized according to this approach. It was remarkable to find that in the teacher training programme, student-centred learning approaches were rarely used. Therefore, the teacher candidates do not have an opportunity to experience student-centred learning in practice.

Conclusion: The teacher candidates’ learning of student-centred learning remained at the knowledge level and they were not able to reach the ‘apply’ level which is necessary to implement this approach in different learning environments. Therefore, the candidates may have difficulty transferring this knowledge to different lessons and contexts.