The TED videos are one of my favorite sources of information. Recently I viewed Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education. This 17-minute video is available free online at http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html.
Mitra, along many other teachers, feels that: “Children will learn to do what they want to do.” Quoting from the video listed above:
At lunch today I spent time talking to Bob Sylwester, my co-author of the Information Age Education Newsletter available free at http://iae-pedia.org/IAE_Newsletter. We talked about his experiences in teaching in a one-room school, and how collaborative learning and older students helping younger students was the norm in those one-room schools of the “good old days.”
The article Peer Pedagogy: Student Collaboration and Reflection in a Learning-Through-Design Project (http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentID=15198) caught my attention later in the afternoon. In 2008 research involving a mixed class of 4th-5th grader students studying science, the authors report:
Last spring I taught a distance education graduate course titled “Increasing the Math Maturity of K-8 Students and Their Teachers.” The course was sponsored by the PrISM Oregon (Preparation for Instruction of Science & Math) project funded by FIPSE (Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education).
Recently I "cleaned up" the detailed syllabus for that course, checked all of the links, and added an Appendix as a non-required supplemental reading. The syllabus is available at http://i-a-e.org/downloads/doc_download/201-extended-syllabus-for-prism-course.html.
In December, 2009, the National Science Foundation sponsored a workshop on the future of STEM education. See http://www.mathcurriculumcenter.org/conferences/stem/index.php. Pay special attention to the "Reflections Papers" article by Sherry Hsi.
Note: In attempting to retrieve this paper on 9/17/2012 I was led to http://www.lawrencehallofscience.org/staff/committees/allhalllearning/2010/BlueSky/Reflection_STEM-BlueSky.pdf. Here is a paragraph from the 2009 paper:
Many (most) readers of this IAE Blog entry are able to decide for themselves what they want to learn and how they want to use what they learn. They routinely act as independent, self-motivated, self-directed learners. This is rather amazing, since our educational system is so strongly oriented toward students learning what they are told to learn, using processes and aids provided by teachers, and being assessed by a system that cares little about the specific interests and goals of the students.
In essence, our educational system promotes a form of learned helplessness as contrasted with students being able to make decisions about what they want to learn and how to learn it. See http://iae-pedia.org/Learned_Helplessness.
