Student-Centered Learning (SCL) – Shifting Pedagogical Focus

Student-centered learning (SCL) is an approach to education, which aims at overcoming some of the problems inherent to more traditional forms of education by focusing on the learner and their needs, rather than being centered around the teacher’s input (The European Higher Education Area, 2018).

Learner-centered education, more familiarly known as Student-Centered Learning (SCL) is a modern way of teaching based on constructivist learning theory, where the role of the students is deemed to be very critical in constructing their own understanding from new information and prior experiences. We often heard that students are expected to be highly involved within the learning process, so they can self-understand the material which will significantly influence their behavior and education. By putting the students’ interests, ideas, and voices as the center of the method, SCL has shifted the focus of instruction from the teacher to the students themselves.

SCL method presents numerous hands-on activities in the classroom, which demands students’ high involvement and for them to take responsibility for their own learning. Within the method, the roles of the teacher have shifted from instructor to facilitator, whose responsible to guide the students in forming their own understanding, while also encourage active participation, ability to express and materialize their ideas during the process. The implementation of SCL in the International Business program of BINUS INTERNATIONAL considered to be a crucial aspect for our teaching method as a business school, where we nurture interactive discussion between facilitators and students, ability to work in a group, building confidence in conveying ideas, as well as respecting the students’ answer and decision within the whole class process.