My blog from Houston, Texas. Updated most weeks, usually on Sundays.
The photos in this week’s blog show the pizza lunch I hosted in my office on Tuesday. The students I invited were those who have been this term’s most consistent participants in the “Where in the World is Dr Codrington?” Geography quiz that I have been running on this website over the past several months (link).
There is a vast, and growing, amount of research evidence to confirm what good educators have always known – the most effective learning occurs when students are pursuing their natural curiosity along new tangents of enquiry. I think the high quality and the creativity of the students’ answers in the “Where in the World is Dr Codrington?” Geography quiz provides some further (although anecdotal) evidence to support this proposition. Participation in the quiz is entirely voluntary; the students undertake their research and discover new facts simply because they want to do so – they are curious, and they want to learn.
As creativity experts such as Sir Ken Robinson have famously argued, many schools are educating students out of their creativity. Robinson argues that “students with restless minds and bodies, far from being cultivated for their energy and curiosity, are ignored or even stigmatised, with terrible consequences” (http://www.ted.com/speakers/sir_ken_robinson.html).
In order to sensitise my senior leadership team to this most important issue, I led the Admin Team through another in my series of strategic leadership sessions last Wednesday. In this latest session, I shared a video of Sugata Mitra’s address at this year’s TED conference at which he was awarded the annual TED Prize. (A link to the video appears at the end of this blog). This year, the TED Prize was worth over a million dollars, and Sugata Mitra received the prize to help finance his dream to build a school in the cloud, or more specifically, to establish self-organized learning environments (SOLEs).
The experiment has since been replicated in many places, and the results have shown that groups of children, with no prior contact with technology, can learn to use computers and the internet on their own, using public computers in open spaces such as roads and playgrounds, even without knowing English. Furthermore, they have been shown to teach themselves English to a reasonable standard of proficiency and gain understanding of knowledge that is up to a decade ahead of the content being taught to that age group in schools.
Mirroring Ken Robinson’s arguments, Sugata Mitra concludes from his research that there is a real danger that uninspiring, over-formal schooling can actually impede students’ progress and educational attainment.
Sugata Mitra thus echoes an emerging body of research evidence showing that schools which do not address individual learning needs stifle creativity and lower learning outcomes. That is why Awty’s draft Strategic Vision highlights the need to diversify teaching practices so that a wide range of learning styles for a diverse range of students can be addressed. It is also why we are investigating the IB Primary Years Program (PYP) in the Lower School and the IB Middle Years Program (MYP) in the Middle and Upper Schools (in the International Section only at this stage), as the constructivist learning approach at the core of both the PYP and MYP is precisely the approach to learning that Sugata Mitra (and the wider research) advocates as being extremely effective.
“Every education system in the world is being reformed at the moment and it’s not enough. Reform is no use anymore, because that’s simply improving a broken model. What we need, and the word has been used many times during the course of the past few days, is not evolution, but a revolution in education. This has to be transformed into something else.
One of the real challenges is to innovate fundamentally in education. Innovation is hard because it means doing something that people don’t find very easy, for the most part. It means challenging what we take for granted, things that we think are obvious. The great problem for reform or transformation is the tyranny of common sense; things that people think, ‘Well, it can’t be done any other way because that’s the way it’s done.’…
We have built our education systems on the model of fast food. You know there are two models of quality assurance in catering. One is fast food, where everything is standardized. The other are things like Zagat and Michelin restaurants, where everything is not standardized, they’re customized to local circumstances. And we have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education, and it’s impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies…
So I think we have to change metaphors. We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it’s an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.”
Awty is far better placed than the vast majority of schools to achieve this ideal of individualised learning, but (at the risk of repeating my blog theme of a couple of weeks ago), the fact that we are good must not blind us to the possibility of becoming excellent.
In his talk, Sugata Mitra spoke about the “end of knowledge”. If by this term he means the end of force-feeding facts to children for no other reason than that the teacher is making them learn, that is not really an end to knowledge. I suspect he means that the nature of knowledge will shift from recollection of facts to helping children develop higher order thinking skills to learn independently and to think critically such that they can gain more knowledge, construct their own original understandings , and thus go beyond factual recollection to analyse new situations. As one of my colleagues commented to me a couple of years ago, without analysis or critical connections, knowledge is just a game of Trivial Pursuit.
•How do my eyes know to cry when I’m sad?
•Is there life on other planets?
•Can you kill a goat by staring at it?
•Why aren’t there any mammals bigger than a blue whale?
•Do boys think differently from girls?
•What are the five best tips for better searching on Google (or Bing)?
•Can anything be less than zero?
•Are there more stars in the universe or grains of sand on all the world’s beaches?
•What is irony?
These questions are a sample of those found in a free 25-page booklet that has been produced by TED and Sugata Mitra that outlines this approach in more detail. Entitled “SOLE – How to bring Self-Organized Learning Environments to your community”, I think it makes fascinating reading, and I encourage you to download a copy from http://www.ted.com/pages/sole_toolkit. The SOLE approach emphasizes learning that is:
•Self-organized
•Curious
•Engaged
•Social
•Collaborative
•Motivated by peer-interest
•Fuelled by adult encouragement and admiration
When I showed the video of Sugata Mitra’s lecture to my Admin Team, the follow up discussion lasted more than half an hour. Although much of this discussion debated the extent to which Sugata Mitra’s approach might really be appropriate for students at Awty, I thought that the exchange of ideas was a very encouraging sign of the genuine interest that his somewhat provocative presentation engendered.
Please do yourself a favour and set aside 20 minutes to watch Sugata Mitra’s very stimulating lecture. You can see it at http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud.html or by clicking the right image below (the left image can be enlarged as a cartoon summary of the talk).
Self-Organised Learning Environments
Sunday, 21 April 2013