I met him today.
He’s even better in person than on Ted Talks.
The presentation focused on Self Organizing Learning Environments.
The bottom line is that children learn best when we (teachers) get out of the way.
I know, it’s not what you wanted to hear.
His talk was truly inspirational.
It’s going to make for a long blog entry, but here are the notes.
The Future of Learning
Where Children Teach Themselves: Self-Organizing Systems in Education
Opening Session
Dr. Sugata Mitra
This was the opening session of the ECIS conference. Dr. Mitra focused on the system of learning that takes place among youth, and explored the connection between current research and the application to the educational field.
His talk was based on some basic premises:
• The quality of traditional primary education declines with ‘remoteness’
• Groups of children, given the appropriate resources, can
a. Learn to use computers and the internet on their own
b. Achieve many objectives of schooling on their own
c. Attain levels of achievement close to traditional schooling with the help of a
friendly, but not knowledgeable, mediator
• Learning is a self organizing system
In his address, Dr. Mitra mentioned some very interesting facts and figures. There are 50mil children who educationally have ample resources, 200mil who have adequate resources and 750mil who have inadequate resources.
There are two kinds of problems. Problems of resources and problems of aspirations.
Do we address these differently, or is there a common solution?
There are places on earth in every country where, for various reasons, good schools cannot be built and where good teachers cannot or do not want to go. All of these places have children. Invariably, trouble comes from the places where good teachers cannot go. They cannot go to the place that needs them the most.
Research was presented on the dropping math scores between schools depending on the distance from New Delhi. There were some possible hypothesis: rural children are not as smart as city children, clever people move to cities and have clever children, teachers would rather teach in the city than in the rural areas. A similar research project in the UK repeated the results. The statistic showed that the bigger density of public housing, the lower the performance. Every country has the equivalence of a “remote” area. The primary difference between the children in these different areas is the teacher.
Dr. Mitra reviewed the “Hole in the Wall” experiment that he conducted in India 12 years ago. Children in the slums had never seen a computer. He placed a computer into a wall like a bank ATM, three feet off the ground. The children began to browse the internet, having never seen a computer before. The feedback from the children was this, “You gave us a computer in English, so we learned enough English to use the computer.” Adults would say, “I can’t speak English so I can’t use the machine.”
In a 9 month span of time, the children had achieved a 45% computer literacy rate (considered average to the general public).
A teacher that can be replaced by a machine SHOULD be.
If children have interest, then education happens.
Given these, results what other experiments can be done?
In 2002 Dr. Mitra did research in Hyderabad, India. The schools he looked at were the English learning schools for poor people. The teachers in these schools were local teachers, not English native speakers. Their accents were very thick, while the grammar was good. Dr. Mitra placed a computer that had speech-to-text programs in it. The children spoke, and the computer typed nonsense. The computer was left there for two months, and the children learned to pronounce English in a more formal way on their own. The children had downloaded a “Speaking Oxford Dictionary” and then feed their speech into the speech-to-text program until they got it correct. All by themselves. Children will teach themselves almost anything if left to themselves. The teachers in Delhi were reporting an increase in the childrens’ English ability and an increase in the depth of their knowledge. They were googling their homework.
After going to Newcastle, Dr. Mitra designed a research project to prove that there are things that students can not teach themselves. The premise was that children in southern tsunami-hit India who speak Tamil can not teach themselves DNA replication information in English. There was a pre-test and a post-test to see whether they could learn it. In the pre-test the children scored a 0. After two months, the children were able to recall the information regarding DNA replication. The score on the post test was a 30%. For the next two months, Dr. Mitra got a lady to stand behind the children and be a “grandmother.” She would say, “Wow, that is really cool! How did you learn that? I could never do that.” By the end of those two months, the post test score was 50%.
The next experiment was done in Gateshead, UK. He formed groups of four students to share one laptop. There were very few rules regarding the system of learning. Students could go between groups, share with other groups, etc. He then gave the children 6 GCSE questions. The best group solved all the questions in 20 minutes. The worst group completed the assignment in 45 minutes. So what? After two months another experiment was done. The same 6 questions were given and students had to write their answers. The exact same score was reached between the students. Students recalled individually what they had learned in a small group…why? Because the learning was their own. They were not TAUGHT.
How far can this go? The next experiment involved 45 UK grandmothers who skyped their ways into the classrooms of Hyderabad, India. Student achievement skyrocketed with the input of these encouraging nurturing adults in their lives.
Conclusion: Children who have reading comprehension skills, coupled with information search and analysis skills can not be stopped. They can learn anything.
Self-Organizing systems appear.
Education is a self organizing system where learning is an emergent phenomenon. Learning happens. In that theory lies the future of learning.
Implications for my teaching: How, as a teacher can I “Get out of the way” of my students’ learning? How do I find the way to marry the interest of my students with opportunity to learn? How can I do this in health and PE in particular? The bar that children set for themselves is way higher than the bar that we often set for our students.
Why is it that so many of my students lack the motivation to learn?
As teachers, you don’t need to have the answer. You need to give the question and get out of the way.
This was a really moving presentation. First of all, students who otherwise are seen as “unteachable” are learning very difficult things. Secondly, the need for a teacher to be the one in charge is clearly over-valued. Teachers set the scene and focus the question. It was thrilling to see the children discover things on their own. It was also humbling to see the incredible joy in learning (and rate of learning) that takes place when the teacher is willing to relinquish some control over the learning. Truly inspiring.
Sounds like a fabulous presentation Dan! The questions you have raised about how we as teachers can motivate and challenge students to reach beyond themselves, to learn for themselves and to work together and help each other will take some pondering. I wonder what the timeframe is for students to self-learn. Do they need more time, or less because the need for constant reinforcement and review is removed?
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