A School In the Cloud

"Learning happens when the educational process self-organizes. Not making learning happen, but letting learning happen."

The Experiment: Set the process in motion, step back, and stand in awe. 

In this TED talk, Sugata Mitra explains his experience running "hole in the wall" experiments in  small communities where he discovered that students, when given a new form of technology and a new set of ideas they have never seen before, will inevitably pick it up and teach themselves and each other. 

The Results: SOLE (Self Organized Learning Environment)

Mitra believes that young people have the innate capability of understanding, absorbing, and organizing new concepts in ways that we cannot necessarily teach. We, as teachers/youth workers, can simply put forward a question or a concept and step back. This idea of letting young people "figure it out" is something we often have a hard time doing. I know I am guilty of thinking this concept is way too hard for them, they won't understand it this way, I need to draw out every step. That is what we are taught. That is, for the most part, how we are taught. As Mitra mentions in the very first few minutes of his talk, that is how schools were built. They were built to teach us in such a way to churn out identical learners. But what if we just step back? What if we present these big concepts and let our students figure it out? What if we le them roll with it? 

The Key: Encouragement

Mitra also spoke about the importance of encouragement. The Oohs and Aahs that we offer to young people. The part I found most interesting was the part where Mitra spoke about the reptilian brain and how our grading system essentially triggers our brains into shutting down. When we fail, we feel threatened. We feel defeated and discouraged. We shut down. That's our form of self-preservation. But the encouragement that we get from our grandmas (as Mitra puts it) and our teachers, empowers our brains. It stimulates us. I think about the time in my schooling where I got glowing remarks from my teahcers and i felt like "Yeah! Let me do it again!" We crave that feeling, and we need  to foster that feeling more often in and out of the classroom.