Riley Lark asks, 'What's at the heart of your classroom?' At the heart of mine are the concepts of student agency and continuous reflection, revision, and renewal.

I teach graduate students: adult teachers and administrators who want a principal or superintendent credential. I've always prided myself on being a student-centered instructor. I include my teaching philosophy in every syllabus:

With deference to all of the educational authors whom I may paraphrase, I believe that

• The teaching-learning process is primarily for the benefit of the learner, not the teacher. 
• All students want to, can, and will learn given the proper learning environment.
• Students actively and individually make sense of what they learn by connecting and integrating it with what they already understand. Teaching cannot occur without learning. I should always seek and value students' points of view in order to understand students' thought processes and knowledge acquisition.
• My ultimate responsibility as a teacher is to create a learning environment that facilitates learning for every student. My ultimate goal is to make each class the best learning experience students have ever had.

In each and every class, I actively solicit student feedback and do my best to structure the course around student-identified needs and interests.

But sometimes that works better than others. Even though my teaching evaluations tend toward the high end, there still are times when I and/or my students struggle. Occasionally that's due to non-course factors that arise in our personal and professional lives. But often it has to do with the decisions that I make as an instructor. In particular, the less structured I am - and the more I put on my students' shoulders in terms of direction-setting, resource-gathering, and other ownership aspects of their learning - often the more painful the learning-teaching process.

My wholly-online data-driven decision-making (DDDM) class this semester is a good example. We started with a few key background readings and two surveys: a self-rating of their school organization against best practices and a survey of their own personal knowledge of and interest in various DDDM topics. I quickly analyzed those so that we had some baseline data from which to work. I then asked them, "based on the data we have before us, what should we focus on?" I also created areas where they could ask more specific questions (e.g., "what questions do you have about [formative assessment, professional learning communities, DDDM technologies]?). I wish I could say that all of my students stepped up and started firing out questions and suggestions based on their own needs and interests. But they didn't. Only some did.