The recent paper by Don Norman and James Spohrer was about, and was titled, Learner-Centered Education. This is an accurate reflection of the pervasive neo-constructivist view. What I would like to hear reactions to is the following view: that learner-centeredness is an unbalanced and out of date view, and should be replaced by a conversational model of learning (as proposed by Gordon Pask and supported by Diana Laurillard) in which teacher and learner are given equally emphasized roles.
I can depict a simple progression of 3 views:
1. The transmission theory, a teacher-centered view, often called the "instructivist" approach, which holds that teaching causes learning, with the teacher's actions as crucial and the learner as a passive receiver.
2. Constructivism, a learner-centered view in which the learner is crucial and teachers cannot cause learning.
3. The conversational model, in which teacher and learner are equally important and must both be active.
In this version of history (!), constructivism is out of date; a useful reaction to the failure of the transmission theory (which refuses to die and so must still be actively combated), but like all reactions an over-reaction from the viewpoint of the search for an accurate theory of the teaching and learning process.
Learner-centeredness seems obviously, crazily, wrong. If it were true, then learners with any choice would avoid teachers and get on with it themselves: but in fact, this is not what we observe. Industry pays for courses with a lot of personal instruction. Students go to institutions where they can encounter instructors: they do not just study alone. Institutions are not under pressure to provide accreditation for students whose only encounter is the examination. Schools could not for a moment function without teachers, and almost everyone agrees that more teachers per pupil would be highly desirable if we could afford it. Almost every study in the literature that measures teacher effects finds that the effect of which teacher a group gets is larger than the effect of the educational treatment. The message most people take from the literature on Logo is that Papert had a big effect on learners, Logo did not. To a learner-centered theorist it has to be merely an amazing coincidence that children in an English speaking family happen to learn English rather than some other language, because of course what is learned depends on the learner, not the teacher.
In the light of this evidence surely we must look for a theory that admits that what the teacher does is as important as what the learner does in determining learning outcomes. The only things to be said for a learner-centered theory are that (a) it is better than the transmission theory, and (b) it is politically correct both to liberals (children should be the center of protection and attention) and right-wingers (in this context the learner is the consumer who pays for the teacher). But to anyone interested in a rational understanding of teaching and learning, or indeed in maximizing learning outcomes, then surely a learner-centered theory is as unbalanced and out of touch with the most obvious facts as would be a "north-pole-centered" theory of magnetism.