Usually, when we use the term “student-centeredness” we are referring to schools and classrooms that orient themselves to the needs, ideas, interests, and preferences of students.  It may seem a bit strange for a school to have to state that it is focused on students.  The learning of students is, after all, the core and primary responsibility of educators and educational institutions.  Yet, there are other powerful forces at play in a school or district.  Often, students don’t have formal representation in the decision-making processes or governance structure of the school.  I remember one education consultant I worked with a few years ago somewhat cynically tell me that the real constituents of schools are the teachers union, the school board, and parents, in that order.  Admittedly, I’m an optimist who chooses to believe that all stakeholders have a role to play in the design and delivery of our education systems: teachers whose professional lives are dedicated to teaching young people, school boards with a fiduciary and governance duty to schools and who must allocate limited resources, and parents who rightfully advocate for the needs of their children.  

But this blog post is not about the politics of schooling.  It is also not a post about student voice and choice in the school process.  Rather, it is about the literal meaning of the phrase “student centeredness.”  To what degree are our students centered?  A few years ago, I was leading a school where we did some work with McKinsey & Company, looking at our systems of talent management and leadership development.  I was introduced to their concept of “centeredness” as the key leadership trait that predicts organizational health and that leads to what they claimed at  “extraordinary results.”  The idea is that organizational leaders who have a clear sense of purpose, cultivate self-awareness, manage energy and pace their work, and who employ effective strategies for engaging and communicating with their community and stakeholders, are those who have the capacity to transform work culture and get meaningful and measurable results.  

I think something similar could be said in cultivating centeredness in our students.  To what extent do our students have opportunities to explore who they are and what matters most to them, consider their purpose(s) in life, and discuss and practice strategies for managing their energy and organizing their life?  Of course we educate students whose developmental reality is much different from that of adults.  We have students who by biological and psychological definition are not yet fully developed or fully realized human beings.  To some degree, we can’t expect our students to be “centered” in ways we might aspire to for adults.  Yet, I still think there is utility in thinking about schools as spaces where we are cultivating an awareness in our students about their developmental trajectory.  We talk a lot in schools about student ownership of learning.  But how can students own their learning when they don’t necessarily understand the developmental context that they find themselves in?  

For me, student-centeredness would mean that the school has created a space where students situate their learning opportunities and educational programs within an emerging awareness of their developmental progress.  Concretely, it requires that students have an awarness of the stages of human development, the nature of cognition, and what it means to learn.  Student-centeredness, therefore, requires us to move away from traditional notions of “academics” versus “social-emotional learning” and see them as two sides of the same developmental coin that cannot be addressed separately or in isolation of one another.  We would include learning about “life skills,” “leadership skills” or “soft skills” as part of the explicit curriculum, just like we do with literacy, numeracy, or any other content-based curriculum topic.  We would have more class offerings, including core coursework, whose focus was more explicitly dedicated to these matters.  Who says that a course in biology is more important than a course in managing conflict, public speaking, or career planning (state legislatures and local school boards set graduation requirements, so admittedly this still is a post about the politics of schooling)?  We’re living in a moment when many of the settled assumptions about how we handle schooling are being both questioned and in some-cases, validated.  Thoughtfully reconsidering the core curriculum, and how we can enhance student-centeredness as a more deliberate outcome of the school experience, should be on the agenda.