Who wouldn’t go to a session entitled ‘Teaching at the Edge of Chaos’?
Sugata Mitra caused a furore at the end of last year’s IATEFL by suggesting that teachers are not needed (Is there a way of taking teachers out of the equation?) and that they in fact get in the way of learning. So of course I had to attend a session which was a response to this. While not a point by point rebuttal, Adrian Tennant’s session picked out five themes to explore as a result of Mitra’s plenary.
- Redundancy of the teacher
- Importance of Ignorance
- Importance of big questions
- Lack of intervention
- Collaborative learning
Though not as vehement as the reaction at the end of Mitra’s plenary in 2014 there were still some dissenting voices at the end of this session.
Tennant argued that Mitra was talking about context-specific situations, mostly remote rural areas in developing countries, but many also remember the example based in a Newcastle primary school in the UK. Tennant mentioned one specific context of an 82 year old teacher who had been teaching for 65 years (in India I think) and where Tennant was the first person to have ever observed him teaching. Teacher observation is a hot button topic and there were several sessions at IATEFL 2015 addressing this mainly about how we can do this in a non-threatening and supportive way. OK there were also people selling the technology to do this. But if we don’t observe, how are we ever going to learn more about the different contexts of teaching?
Redundancy of the teacher
This is not about mass unemployment of teachers but rather a call to let learners do the learning. Tennant gave several examples of places he had visited where the teachers told him that their students would not learn without their intervention. Each time he demonstrated that by issuing a challenge, even students used to a very structured and teacher-centred education could rise to the challenge and work towards a solution.
Importance of ignorance
Learning is messy yet education is linear.
We should be showing students that the teacher does not know everything. Teachers should become co-learners. When we don’t know something, we should be saying, how can we find out?
Importance of big questions
Tennant talked about the anguish of one teacher who asked him ‘How can I deal with the unanswerable questions?’ Tennant sees this as an opportunity rather than an occasion for despair.
‘Knowledge makes aspects of the world visible; ignorance leaves much of it invisible.”
We should be encouraging big questions.
Intervention gets in the way of learning
Tennant took us through a few anecdotal examples where given the opportunity, students are perfectly willing and able to direct their own learning, even in contexts where a heavily structured teacher guidance model is the norm. When asked, one of the students actually said that he liked the independent exercises because they were learning, the implication being that they were not learning during teacher-directed sessions.
Collaborative learning
Tennant showed us several examples where, left to their own devices, learners will instinctively collaborate to meet the challenge, whatever that challenge happens to be, as Mitra has found in his Hole in the Wall experiments. So we should be challenging students and we should be encouraging or rather enabling collaborative learning.
My own experience of student-directed learning both as a teacher but especially as a student has been that students can get pretty angry when they see their teacher being ‘lazy’ and letting them do all the work so I think that it will take more than one ‘wow’ session from a visiting foreigner to really embed such an approach. In the audience feedback, Koussi Ndai from Côte d’Ivoire shared his experience of being a rebel as he phrased it, by allowing his students to choose their topics and letting them explore those topics in groups and present them later to their classmates. His students respond enthusiastically to this way of doing things plus their ability in English increases. A living example of the principles espoused in this session.
But still there were people saying it would never work in their classroom at the end.
