Self organised learning - the soul of inquiry on a small yet boarder scale?
I recently read an article discussing self organised learning environments, or SOLE, which will maybe become a new buzz word in education. Students come up with an open-ended 'big' question, get themselves into fluid groups, see what they can find out on the internet, then present back to the class. At first thought they appear to be mini-inquiries, I guess they are. The example schools carry out SOLE sessions several times a week, some once a day, building their students skills continually.
The movement was spurred by Sugata Mitra's 'Hole in the wall' experiment, publicised by his TED talk, where a group of kids from a Delhi slum figured out how to navigate the Internet in English simply by playing with a computer for a few days. The article goes on to relate the SOLE learning replicated in Cleveland, and the benefits inner city kids have experienced.
Many teachers in New Zealand would be doing similar without the buzz word attached.
The idea of doing short investigations on a daily basis is a different take on how inquiry is often run. The benefit of building up questioning, discussion and research skills through repeating the process often is something that gets left out when you do one or two research projects a term. When they are larger projects it can be a real difficulty getting a class of even intermediate age students to come up with questions, research, categorise and utilise information from the internet - avoiding plagiarism and actually encouraging thought and understanding.
The movement was spurred by Sugata Mitra's 'Hole in the wall' experiment, publicised by his TED talk, where a group of kids from a Delhi slum figured out how to navigate the Internet in English simply by playing with a computer for a few days. The article goes on to relate the SOLE learning replicated in Cleveland, and the benefits inner city kids have experienced.
Many teachers in New Zealand would be doing similar without the buzz word attached.
The idea of doing short investigations on a daily basis is a different take on how inquiry is often run. The benefit of building up questioning, discussion and research skills through repeating the process often is something that gets left out when you do one or two research projects a term. When they are larger projects it can be a real difficulty getting a class of even intermediate age students to come up with questions, research, categorise and utilise information from the internet - avoiding plagiarism and actually encouraging thought and understanding.
“Over time you actually hone in on the art of asking questions,” Jeffery McClellan, SOLE promoter said. “Kids become much more inquisitive, they start to own their own learning. And it’s a great way to show kids that the teacher doesn’t hold all the answers. Ultimately it’s up to individuals to find answers to life’s questions."
The big and messy questions children are asked to research don't have just one answer. They could be attached to a curriculum area, but are usually multi-disciplinary. Students did a SOLE on the question: “Just because we can make the technology, should we?” where they delved into the ethical complexities of technology and human life. SOLE relating more specifically to numeracy asked, "What would Charles Darwin think about random sampling?" or "How do polls help predict who will be [Prime minister]?" .
“The SOLEs have really worked out well when they are value questions or questions that students can have opposing answers to. ” said principal Feowyn MacKinnon, MC2 STEM High School in Cleveland.
Students choose who they work with, find their own information, draw their own conclusions and present their findings to the whole class. Betchel, a teacher of SOLE, said she had less trouble differentiating her program. As we know, finding challenging work for a varied class of learners is extremely difficult. But because SOLE is so open-ended, more advanced students are helping struggling students, or they could go on a deeper tangent of their own. Kids access information in whatever way they can, learning from their peers at every stage.
“Seeing them take charge has really showed us that maybe we are being a little too rigid and structured, and not trusting our students enough,” Betchel said. There are still traditional elements in other parts of the day but she wonders if students are actually being held back by these structures. One 6 year old asked, “Could we hear if our ears were square?” His class did a SOLE to find out more about the physics and biology of hearing. It makes you think what couldn't be covered through SOLE?
“Seeing them take charge has really showed us that maybe we are being a little too rigid and structured, and not trusting our students enough,” Betchel said. There are still traditional elements in other parts of the day but she wonders if students are actually being held back by these structures. One 6 year old asked, “Could we hear if our ears were square?” His class did a SOLE to find out more about the physics and biology of hearing. It makes you think what couldn't be covered through SOLE?
I've been mulling over lately some of the advantages of having so many comprehensive web-based apps and programs (WAPs). Yes, we can flip our learning - having the content delivered, skills practiced, and assessed by WAPs which frees up the teacher. But what do we do with our face to face time? Putting skills into context, relating them to authentic contexts seem obvious but the question for me has been how. Maybe SOLEs are a good start - a term of running SOLEs daily at the start of the year would really prep your class for delving deeper, for longer. If that's what we want that is. Worth thinking about.
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