Having students take the lead on not just what they learn, but how they learn and when they learn, is the headline of any keynote, masterclass or set of critical conversations teachers and I undertake together. Throughout our latest New Zealand, Australia and California tour we spent 80% of the time making our brains hurt with the notion that teachers need to teach less to let more learning happen, and explored some of the structures, attitudes and project ideas that might help whole schools make that transition.
Sugata Mitra's TED Talk is making waves for reminding us that, left to their own devices and left to follow their passions, young people will learn without a teacher. No real shock and horror there, other than the fact that schools, by and large, have been built around the opposite - perpetuating the notion that there is content to be learnt first and foremost, and experts who will curate and prime that content for different ages and stages.
The question we're still left with after Mitra's inspiring experiments is: what does it mean for me?
Well, Core Education in New Zealand have just released another of my EDTalks on the notion of student-led learning, and how many schools, particularly in early years/kindergarten and primary/elementary, have been teaching less to learn more:
I think there are some important examples to go and see from this short video to see how we can make a seismic change happen with smaller actions: the Tinkering School, North Lanarkshire's approach to mitigating risk in early years/kindergarten and creating a Learning Wall at high school to explore how we collaborate across department areas.
Ian Gilbert in his TEDxDubai talk is helpful in his idea of how we might engage in "antiteaching" without teachers doing themselves out of a job: he gives some lovely examples of 'Thunks", impossible questions with no right answer designed to get children thinking about why and how rather than what (and helping avoid a generation of average knowers rather than erudite thinkers:
TEDx Dubai 2009 - Ian Gilbert from Giorgio Ungania on Vimeo.
What other practical means do we have of helping students to leave the room feeling they have more to learn than when they entered it? What other ways do we have of making learning less easy, being less helpful?
Sugata Mitra is a keynote at this year's Scottish Learning Festival.
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