Thanks to a tip from Dan Long, I saw Sugata Mitra’s TEDTalk on “New Experiments in Self Teaching”. Mitra has spent the better part of the last 20 years experimenting with educational technology and it’s impact on teaching and learning. His conclusions are quite profound and speak to a significant paradigm shift in the way our schools should be structured. His most famous experiment which he has repeated all over India, and then in a varied form all over the world, is called “The Hole in the Wall.” He places a simple computer with a touch pad and internet access in a remote area and leaves it. From the first experiment in a New Delhi slum to more recent experiments in Africa, he has consistently found that without any “teaching” children “self-organize” and learning “emerges”.
“A self-organizing system is one where the system’s structure appears without explicit intervention from outside the system.” They also demonstrate emergence which Mitra defines as “the appearance of a property not previously observed as a functional characteristic of the system.” He then simply but profoundly concludes that “Education is a self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon.”
This is quite fascinating, yet not altogether unexpected, stuff. It does suggest that teachers must take a fundamentally different role in the classroom; mainly as a facilitator who gets out of the way rather than a more dominant leading presence in the class.
And for those who claim that there are still certain tasks for which students need a teacher, Mitra has this great experiment. He set up a computer in a classroom in a Tamil-speaking village of south-eastern India. He put up a file for them to explain when he returned in two months. The file was, in English, on bio-technology. When he returned, the students were depressed. They claimed to have learned nothing despite looking at the file every day. When Mitra pressed them on their two months, one 12 year-old girl responded “Apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease we’ve understood nothing else.” No teacher, no English and no training in biology, genetics or technology and they still learned. What if learning, he suggests, doesn’t come from a teacher. What if learning, perhaps, means a little bit more.
© Chuck Jones & Ted Geisel
This is obviously a violent segue to another epiphany about unstoppable emergent behavior; a seasonally-specific one I just watched last night with my kids.
“And the Grinch, stood puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled ’till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store. What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.”
I thought I’d close with another quote that simply eloquently and succinctly states what the 21st century teacher’s role is in student learning. It comes from Ken Kay with Partnership for 21st Century Skills:
“So the coin of the realm is not memorizing the facts that they are going to need for the rest of their lives. The coin of the realm will be
*do you know how to find information,
*do you know how to validate it,
*do you know how to synthesize it,
*do you know how to leverage it,
*do you know how to communicate it,
*do you know how to collaborate with it,
*do you know how to problem solve with it.
That is the new 21st century set of literacies and it looks a lot different than the model that most of us were raised under.”
