When it comes to education, conventional or traditional isn’t always better. Oftentimes, traditional approaches to education focus on lectures and memorization. By contrast, a learner-centered education, also known as student-centered learning, is where the student is essentially the focal point of their educational experience. It’s a strategy that diverts the focus to the student, teaching them skills through an approach that fosters independence, collaboration, and responsibility. For those hoping to become a community support worker, some schools will use this approach in order to help cultivate a strong sense of independence, teamwork, and self-determination.

It’s an approach that has many strengths and upsides, and which helps students become better-prepared for their professional lives. Are you curious about the merits of student-centered learning, and how it might benefit you? Here’s how a learner-centered education can help you become a community support worker.

It Shifts the Balance of Power from the Teacher to the Student

As its name implies, learner-centered education shifts the focus away from the teacher and onto the student in terms of how learning is processed and applied. In this environment, the teacher is more of a facilitator. More specifically, their role is to help guide students with investigating and solving problems, while letting them absorb the material authentically and define their experience with learning. With the students actively involving themselves and engaging with the material, they take control of the learning process. Everyone has different ways of learning, and focusing the educational experience on the learner can help them develop skills and master course material in ways that best suit them.

It Encourages Collaboration Among Students

Another element that makes learner-centered education stand out is that it often allows for students to work together in groups and interact with each other to not only learn how to work as a team, but to also develop capacities for empathy and better understanding others’ perspectives.

Through group activities, collaborative assignments, and/or discussions, group work in learner-centered education helps develop skills in teamwork, helping emphasize the importance of cooperative learning. Since community support workers offer services and support to various clients in need—often working together toward solutions—this approach can help them learn how best to work with others after receiving a community support worker diploma.

It Teaches Problem-Solving Skills Necessary for Success After Community Support Worker Training

Because of the approach that learner-centered education provides to students, it can teach them skills like problem-solving, critical thinking, reflective thinking, teamwork, independence, and effective self-direction. Instead of waiting for the teacher to pass information on to them to be passively absorbed, students are encouraged to find solutions and make decisions based on the information given. This helps cultivate problem-solving skills, which those in community support worker training can then harness into helping others with their personal issues—whether mental health, physical disability, substance misuse, or otherwise—after obtaining their diploma.

Are you looking to attend community support worker college?

Contact Discovery Community College to find out more about our programs!