Getting Real About What It Takes To Make The Shift To Student-Centered Learning in Science

<p>You may have heard, seen, read, or assumed that making the switch to a student-centered classroom will create more time for you, provide you with more freedom, or that you’ll work less hard.  With teachers continuing to leave the profession for a laundry list of reasons related to overwork, under-appreciation, unreasonable expectations, and the general difficulty with maintaining a work-life balance, it seems like simply learning how to implement student-centered learning strategies would ease the burden they carry, providing them with more opportunity to enjoy their profession and their personal lives.</p> <p>I have to remind myself of this sometimes, science teacher friends … NOTHING REALLY GOOD IS EVER FREE AND OFTEN ISN’T EASY.</p> <p>I am living, breathing proof that those promises claiming student-centered classrooms provide more pleasure and more fulfillment for teachers CAN BE realized.  They ARE possible and, I’d even say they’re LIKELY!  There is a light at the end of the tunnel!   But the notion that they just, POOF!, happen?  That’s unrealistic and it’ an unfair, irresponsible idea to peddle.</p> <p>The reason I started this podcast is that it wasn’t a stressless, work-free transition for me at all.  It was a TIRELESS effort to re-engineer my chemistry lesson plans to support student-centered learning and prevent me from falling back to those teacher-centered habits of lecturing and demonstrating.  On account of it being a complete and total mindset shift, it took REAL FOCUS, REAL INTENT to craft new, interactive, science lesson plans.  And, because I believe whole-heartedly in <a href='https://www.labineverylesson.com/post/setting-up-the-student-centered-classroom-generating-buy-in-and-being-consistent'>the benefits of consistency </a>in near-everything, I set out to craft <a href='http://www.labineverylesson.com/5elements'>A NEW SCIENCE LESSON PLAN FRAMEWORK</a> that would guide the development of EVERY NEW CHEMISTRY LESSON PLAN I wrote.    </p> <p>I, too, benefited from the consistency that