The SOLE of teaching

 Wow, just finished watching and reading Sugata Mitra's Ted Talk, "Build a School in the Cloud" (2013) and was left feeling super-inspired. I love how he uses the term SOLE, or Self-Organized Learning Environment, to describe his method, and his talk does indicate that he's touched at the "soul" of teaching and learning. 

Mitra compares the teacher to a Granny, and as I've gotten older I have noticed that Granny-style has become more and more my preferred method of teaching. I laughed out loud when Mitra said in response to children asking how to figure out to use the computer that would teach them about DNA: "I haven’t the foggiest idea, and anyway, I’m going away.” I was reminded of what I consider my most joyful and proud moment teaching this year, the "Landform Project." 

For the Landform Project, I knew that my students would recognize connections between our Science curriculum, which focused on Soils, Rocks, and Landforms, and our Social Studies curriculum, focused on U.S. Geography. We were just beginning to study the western U.S. and I knew that landforms would be an important part of our geography learning. And I also knew my students well at this point in the year - it was around the beginning of March when the project began. And so I asked the following of my students:

-Pick a Western state

-Find out about an important landform in that state

-Figure out a way to present about your landform, using a medium other than Google Slides

-You can use Chromebooks and whatever materials you find in the art room.

And then I basically left.

For days the students labored at these projects. They taught themselves how to use Microsoft Flight Simulator. They taught themselves how to build paper mache volcanoes, and then explode those volcanoes. They practiced exploding their volcanoes over and over again. And then they wrote about their process.

All the while, I helped them find supplies, cleaned up messes, organized the art room, and went about my encouragement business. They did all the heavy lifting.

The end result was far better than what would have developed had I given them a rubric and set of rules and expectations. They learned and understood about how the landform formed, and its importance in their state. And they were able to articulate and explain about their landform to another class of students whom they invited to see the projects.

So, I'm going to explore more my role as a "Granny" in the online environment. To be in the background and ask "How did you do that?" and "What are you looking at? What are you doing?" and say "Tell me more about that!" - to give the ownership to my kiddos.