After watching the TED talk: Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education, where Mitra discussed the findings of his Hole in the wall 1999-2001 experiment, I found I had lots to think about and even more questions. Some of the points that stood out to me most were:
· A teacher that can be replaced by a machine, should be
· If students have interest, then education happens (learning for the sake of learning)
· Photographic recall because they are discussing it
· Other scores show that the marks go up over time because the children continue to Google the information
I thought it was interesting when Mitra introduced the Grandmother concept to his study. I was reminded of learning about differential reinforcement in another education class. According to Woolfolk, Winne, Perry (1012) “differential reinforcement means ignoring inappropriate behaviours, while being sure to reinforce appropriate behaviours as soon as they occur.” This is what the grandmother concept was doing for these children.
Some questions that I have been pondering since watching this video are:
· How does, where people grow up influence their desire to learn?
· Are teachers needed then?
· What are teachers providing students that they cannot get from other places?
· Perhaps Mitra included the quote: “There are places on Earth, in every country, where, for various reasons, good schools cannot be built and good teachers cannot or do not want to do...” to imply that computers are a useful substitute when teachers are not available.
Lindsay
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your question about "do we need teachers?" If teachers's sole purpose is to simply transfer facts, then perhaps teachers are not needed. yet, I don't believe this to be so. We have the opportunity to teach many things to our students beyond facts. The popularity of project based learning enables teachers to teach students to synthesize information, to problem solve, and to reflect on information.
Students often don't know what they don't know. I believe they can discover this, but teachers can also guide lead students to information.
We also have the opportunity to help students to build character, challenging as a class or one-on-one. So many of these things cannot be taught by google. It is also an incredible privilege for me as a teacher to lead students beyond the facts!