Creating a Student-Centered Learning Experience

How an Instructor’s Ability to Listen — Not Just Lecture — Directly Impacts Student Success

In most universities, lectures are the norm. Professors typically spend classroom hours speaking in front of a large audience of students, with the expectation that the information they are sharing will be returned through future exams and tests.

In contrast, at Akilah, Information Systems instructor Lucy Cherono says:

“The voice you will hear the least is the instructor’s, because at Akilah, the model is student-centered. The instructor is just a facilitator guiding learners to discover.”

There is ample global academic research showing that student engagement is higher when teachers keep a low teacher-to-student talk ratio (while of course utilizing intentional techniques to inspire student participation). Overall, experts say, to combat classrooms dominated by TTT (“teacher talk time”), more instructor listening is necessary across the board. This gives students the chance to engage — and ultimately learn — more effectively.** In fact, there is a popular term in educational circles for this transition: we’ve changed the teacher’s role from the “Sage on the Stage” to the “Guide on the Side.”

“What is special is the teacher talk time which is considerably less than the normal instruction model. It allows students the space to discover new content and broaden their existing knowledge on their own.”

- Phoebe Uluka, Senior Faculty

The result is a classroom that looks more like a co-working space than a lecture hall— and the long-term impacts in the workforce are profound. Students who master learning through hands-on engagement are more job-ready than students who spend the majority of their time listening passively to teacher talk, or focused on memorization.

Lucy explains,

“…The Akilah learning experience focuses on what a student can do at the workplace instead of what students can memorize. The feedback we get from the industry is that our students can be relied on even with no or little training when they are taken as interns on their first days at work.”

The classroom dynamic of more student involvement helps students gain confidence and mastery. Kevin Ireri Mbogo, Instructor of English and Leadership, summarizes it this way:

“(We are) diminishing the “emperor” role of a teacher which is characteristic of the traditional setting. (We) replace it with one of a discovery facilitator. The learner simply learns. This way, the main accomplishment of a school is not that the teacher taught, but that the student learned.”

*Hattie, J. (2012). Visible learning for teachers: Maximizing impact on learning. New York, NY: Routledge

*Billings, L., & Roberts, T. (2014). From Mindless to Meaningful. Educational Leadership, 72(3), 60