Tuesday, September 7, 2010
The Child-Driven Education: Sugata Mitra
Sugata Mitra's computer-in-a-wall experiment has shown some phenomenal results. His work is giving us a broader way to think about technology in classrooms, the way we expect students to learn individually and in groups, best uses of current information as curriculum material, and what it means to teach.
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First off, I LOVE the TED talks. This one is great! Such interesting findings to come out of these experiments. The question here is what our takeaway from watching this should be.
ReplyDeleteThis ties in nicely with Bodrova & Leong's Tools of the Mind: http://www.mscd.edu/extendedcampus/toolsofthemind/about/index.shtml
"According to Vygotsky, until children learn to use mental tools, their learning is largely controlled by the environment: they attend only to the things that are the brightest or loudest and they can remember something only if has been repeated many times. AFTER children master mental tools, they can become in charge of their own learning by attending and remembering in an intentional and purposeful way. Similar to how using mental tools transforms children’s cognitive behaviors, they can also transform their physical, social and emotional behaviors. From being "slaves to the environment," children become "masters of their own behavior." As children are taught and practice an increasing number of various mental tools, they transform not only their external behaviors, but also their minds, leading to the emergence of higher mental functions."
Beyond the quote above, it also meshes well with the concept of the Zone of Proximal Development. Both Tools of the Mind and the ZPD are from Lev Vygotsky (old, dead Russian psychologist who was a contemporary to Piaget).
This image helps visualize what is meant by the ZPD: http://www.mscd.edu/extendedcampus/toolsofthemind/assets/images/graphics/ZPDimage[1].gif
For Vygotsky, learning is social mechanism. So, group work of the sort that Sugata Mitra describes is very key to the learning process. In a Tools of the Mind classroom, students work in groups and follow play plans. The teacher is there largely as a facilitator, or as Mitra says, a granny. The teacher helps orchestrate the overall theme of the day and helps make sure students are on task and following the play plans they have written for themselves. The notion of applying technology pursuits to the same idea is pretty spiffy. You have a figurehead, someone to say, "Here is the concept framework in which we will work today." Then that person, after providing some background (however minimal or expansive) allows the students to explore the concept as fully as possible.
So, how could we utilize these sorts of methodologies in our school?