Knowra Child-centered education Child-centered education An approach to education that organizes teaching around learners’ needs, interests, development, and activity. It gives learners an active role while teachers guide and support learning.
Constructivism : A theory of learning in which people build knowledge by interpreting experience and relating new ideas to prior understanding. It explains why learners’ active interpretation, rather than passive reception, matters.
Progressive education : An educational reform movement emphasizing experience, inquiry, and the development of the whole learner. Child-centered education grew within this broader challenge to conventional schooling.
Reggio Emilia approach : An early childhood educational philosophy from Reggio Emilia, Italy, emphasizing projects, relationships, documentation, and children’s expressive capabilities. It organizes early learning around children’s questions, collaboration, and long-term projects.
Teacher-centered instruction : An instructional approach in which teachers primarily direct content, pacing, activities, and classroom decisions. It assigns authority and activity differently from child-centered education.
Differentiated instruction : An approach that adapts teaching content, process, or products to learners’ readiness, interests, and learning needs. It translates attention to individual differences into varied teaching and tasks.
John Dewey : An American philosopher and educator who argued that education should connect experience, inquiry, and democratic life. His account of learning through experience helped shape child-centered educational practice.
Montessori education : An educational method using prepared environments, carefully designed materials, and periods of self-directed activity. It is a widely adopted model for structuring choice and independence in children’s work.
Direct instruction : A structured teaching approach using explicit explanations, modeling, guided practice, and planned review. It shows how clear teacher-led instruction differs from learner-led activity.
Inquiry-based learning : An approach in which learners investigate questions or problems and develop understanding through evidence and reflection. Learner questions and investigation make activity central to instruction.
Maria Montessori : An Italian physician and educator who developed an educational method based on prepared environments and children’s self-directed activity. Her schools made developmental observation and purposeful independence concrete.
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