by Lokemun Magar

Created on: July 05, 2009   Last Updated: July 08, 2009

Lecturers and tutors of graduate students make a great mistake if they think that graduate students would, by the time they start studying for their Masters, have developed sedentary, laid back, auditory learning styles. Such strategies for teaching graduate students would fall flat and the teacher-focused strategies would show in the students' poor results. Graduate students are on the go. They are at the height of self-discovery and self-awareness. Some might have started work and gained some experience in their field.

Having to sit still, copy notes in lecture-style learning format is a sure way to kill their interest in learning, especially when they are already independent learners who can seek out for themselves, by reading in the Library or going on-line, the knowledge you are dishing out to them. If they are attending class after a hard day's work, and their minds are on their babies at home, it would be a great challenge to get them to focus on the teacher performing on the raised platform, pouring out notes that could have been found and read in the on-line library instead. In order for lecturers and tutors to succeed in their roles, they must no longer place greater emphasis on teacher-centered approaches and focus instead on student-centered learning processes.

Teacher-centered approaches are great to begin and end a series of lessons on a subject. In-between teachers need to throw the focus back on the students who will be the ones taking the examinations. The more these students are involved in the thinking processes during lessons, the better prepared they are to think and perform during the examinations. These are great strategies that work with college and university students:

~ Group reads, research and discussions allow students to be pro-actively seeking information for themselves. In order for this strategy to gain the desired results, teachers must have done their homework first to seek out existing specific on-line references and easily available books in the library. Do not send students on a generic search on a topic as they would end up with lots of information from websites they cannot verify as accurate. If no prescribed personal texts exist, sending a hundred students to the library on the hunt of one required text would end up with frustrated students who would abandon search as hoggers hold on to the text, preventing others use of it. Instead, teachers may make limited copies of the specified page for group discussions in the

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