For the last 14 years, I have been an experimenter. Constantly seeking new ideas and ways to get students to learn, I regularly find a new strategy and can not wait to implement it in my classroom. Occasionally, a strategy is a dud, and I am forced to relegate it to my list of things never to do again. But many strategies have worked, at least initially. In order to continue to work, these strategies need to constantly be evaluated, assessed, reflected upon, and adapted. What I hope to accomplish with this journal is to chronicle the development of an idea, to track the evolution of a strategy I wish to implement in my classroom.
The newest strategy I'll be trying is a concept called Self-Organized Learning Environments, or SOLEs. The concept was developed by a British professor of educational technology named Dr. Sugata Mitra. I first came across Dr. Mitra in a video on the future of learning in a networked society on YouTube, which was published by Ericsson. In the video, Dr. Mitra presented some fascinating paradigm shifts that have resonated with me ever since. In fact, I watch the YouTube video often just for inspiration.
Dr. Mitra suggests things like "Teachers don't need to give answers anymore, because answers are everywhere. ...A teacher's job is to lead you to ask the right kinds of questions." This observation and others come, at least in part, from Dr. Mitra's fascinating experiment called "The Hole in the Wall". In 1999, Dr. Mitra and his team placed internet-connected computers in kiosks in remote, impoverished villages in India. The kiosks were designed to be accessed by the children of the village. When Dr. Mitra returned to the villages several months later, he found that the students, self-taught with a networked computer that worked only in English, had learned astounding things. He continued his observations and continues to try to increase learning opportunities for children in areas where, he suggests, "teachers would not want to go."
From his research, Dr. Mitra discovered that these self-organized groups were most effective at learning when they had approximately 4 students to a computer, could pick their own groups, could switch groups at any time, and could walk around freely to see what others were doing. This is the foundation for my experiment, and for my action research on implementing the concept of SOLE into my classroom.