Network Schools – Wayne Gerseny to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview u w B l.html?h I’ll smid=url-share the Is for

My niece in PA works as a technologist in a public school and is a Facebook friend. Like me, she is frustrated that public schools have not figured out how to take full advantage of technology. Indeed, given that she is even MORE aware of the possibilities and still has many years of work in front of her, she is probably DOUBLY frustrated.

Last night she posted the following: Doing home work on a Saturday night sucks, but worth it when I find something as cool as this! What did she find? A TED talk posted on the BBC webpage entitled “The Child Driven Education”. The synopsis of the talk follows:

Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education: the best teachers and schools don’t exist where they’re needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionise how we think about teaching. Talk recorded 15 July 2010.

Two aphorisms included in his talk indicate the general theory:

• Children will learn to do what they want to learn to do
• If children have interest, education happens (from an interview with Arthur Clarke)

These quotes resonate with me because I believe that all students have an innate desire to learn and schools should reinforce that desire instead of directing that desire. Mitra’s means of reinforcing the desire was to use the “grandmother method” of coaching self-directed learning teams. Instead of having a content driven teacher telling children that their answers are right, he has a grandmother who has no knowledge of pedagogy or content egging the students on by expressing wonder at how well the children are doing, the same way a loving grandmother does.

Mitra also believes that children learn more and retain the learning longer when they work in groups. He organized the classroom he monitored into groups of four children and assigned the groups broad concepts to master. At the conclusion of the work he assessed them and found that the individuals in these self-regulated groups learned as much as students in traditional classrooms. When a traditional teacher challenged the results by asking if “deep learning” took place (e.g. learning that would be retained) he accepted the challenge and administered a different version of the assessment months later and found that the students held onto the concepts even better than those taught traditionally. His theory: when students learn the information through discussion it stays with them longer than when it is “fed” to them.

The talk also described work done in India where desperately poor students who had never used computers before worked in small self-organized groups to master material presented in English, which was not their native tongue.

So… why aren’t US public schools using technology in this way? Because we are stuck with the mental model of schooling being analogous to a factory where we take raw material and mold it into a finished product… a mental model that is reinforced with our testing regimen based on age-based grouping of students. The fastest way to break the mold— to go beyond factory schools into self-organized and self-paced learning— would be to replace the use of standardized tests with the use of personalized learning plans.

And what will happen if we don’t do this in our public school systems? Younger tech savvy teachers like my niece, who are frustrated by the pace of change in public education will be drawn to charter schools that embrace the use of technology and those charter schools, be they for profit or non-profit, will increase their market share by attracting parents who see their children stymied by a system that feeds them a curriculum designed to increase test scores instead of a curriculum that quenches their thirst for learning.