I recently watched Sugata Mitra's 2013 TED award-winning talk in which he sets out his idea of the future of education. It's a compelling and entertaining talk, and I urge you all to watch it if you haven't already done so.
In a nutshell, Mitra conducted a series of experiments about learning. He went to remote villages in India and placed a computer somewhere where children could access it. The computers only operated in English, which the kids didn't speak. After a time, Mitra would go back to see what the kids had done, and they had invariably learned how to operate the computer, learned some English, and learned some other things besides. With their natural curiosity and some resources, children organized their own learning.
Mitra points out that schools as we know them are becoming increasingly outdated as they no longer focus on the knowledge and skill sets students will need in their future lives. The notion of teachers imparting wisdom to students is becoming defunct as students are able to easily research anything they wish to know. With the abundance of information so easily accessible on the internet, the challenge for teachers is no longer getting information across to students; we must instead ask ourselves 'How can we motivate students to want to know?' The children in remote villages studied by Mitra seem like an exceptional case - they are extremely motivated by the novelty of computers and the internet, and excited by the world of information suddenly available to them. How do we get already computer-literate and internet-using children as excited about discovery?
The simple answer is that we, the teachers, need to ask the right questions. Organizing a curriculum around fascinating questions that students will want to answer is one way to engage them in learning, and to make them responsible for their own progress. It is the teacher's responsibility to make the curriculum interesting enough for students - if it is boring or irrelevant, why are we trying to make them learn it? Complex content can be framed as a great question, and teachers can help guide students as they form an answer. Mitra envisions a model of a Self Organized Learning Environment (SOLE), in which teachers ask a question, then stand back and admire the answer. The teacher can and should leave the room to observe from afar while the students work on the problem.
This idea of asking essential questions is an important one that is applicable to any classroom. Learning can and should be organized around real-world concerns rather than falsely divided subjects. You can find a list of big questions here on the School in the Cloud website, set up after Mitra's TED talk to help fulfill his vision of SOLEs around the world. I recommend taking a look through these questions and maybe contributing some of your own.
To find out how Mitra has been developing his ideas since his TED win, watch this recent update on how the School in the Cloud is coming along.
Finally, see how Finland are reorganizing their schools to focus on topics instead of subjects, in a move I hope will catch on everywhere.
The hole in the wall experiments show us that all kids need is the knowledge of how to learn, and a big question to spark their interest, and they will do the rest for themselves. We just have to let them.
