In 1999, Sugata Mitra placed a computer in a hole in a wall to confirm a hunch. Mitra felt that the young children of the village could learn to use the computer without any direct supervision or prior experience. Following the success of that experiment, Mitra put other computers in other villages and schools and pushed children to learn more difficult content, and each time the students learned what was asked of them at a rate similar to those who had more experiences and resources.
Photo credit to flickr user TroublePython
On the website describing Mitra’s work, this approach is called minimally invasive pedagogy, which is defined as “a pedagogic method that uses the learning environment to generate an adequate level of motivation to induce learning in groups of children, with minimal, or no, intervention by a teacher.” As an illustration of what minimally invasive intervention might look like, Mitra offers the “granny cloud,” a group of English grandmothers who Skype with children in India. The grandmothers dote on the children, asking the children to show them what they know how to do and then marveling at their demonstration. Continue reading ‘Five years, five lessons in five words: Word 2, nudge’
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