Teacher controlled vs. student centered classrooms (Prompt 2)

"Teaching with a lot of control is easy. Handing control over to the students, and planning for every possible outcome, adapting instruction where they take it, is extremely difficult, but worth it." 

I think that this statement is very true. It is not hard for a teacher to teacher with a lot of control. Teachers can do a lot of planning ahead of time- such as making lesson plans, creating or printing off tests/quizzes/worksheets, creating projects and activities to do with the class, etc. But no matter how much a teacher plans ahead and teachers with control, one can never exactly prepare for how students will behave during the actual lesson and how they will respond to it. Because of this, it can be very hard to plan for every outcome and hand control over to students. Giving students control puts a great amount of trust in students, trust that the teacher may be cautious to give students. A teacher can hand over control but still supporting learning in many instances, including letting students choose a book or topic for a project, letting them decide their own groups for group activities and projects, and letting them choose some of the class rules and rewards.

In my fieldwork experience, many elements were controlled by the teacher. One example I could think of was their biography book project. Students were allowed to choose what biography they wanted to read and do their project on (student-centered), but the teacher had control over the project (teacher-controlled). Also, if the teacher felt a certain book was above the level of a student, she would recommend a different book for the student, which made it more teacher-controlled.

Giving students control over aspects of their learning fosters intrinsic learning, because students have control of what (and sometimes how) they are learning, making the topic/lesson more interesting and engaging for them. In teacher-controlled lessons/classrooms, students might be less intrinsically motivated and more extrinsically motivated by things such as getting good grades.