Greg Ashman & Tom Bennett write about 'self-directed lea

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debbie
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Greg Ashman & Tom Bennett write about 'self-directed lea

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Greg Ashman responds to Debra Kidd re the subject of 'self-directed learning' via his blog 'Filling the Pail':


https://gregashman.wordpress.com/2015/0 ... -learning/
Debra notes the recent research findings of Sugata Mitra that students can learn things for themselves. There has been much comment about the validity of these findings and I don’t intend to analyse that here. However, there is an important point to make. Were there to be anyone who was arguing that children cannot learn things by themselves, then Debra’s post would be an effective rebuttal of it. She writes of Sam who, after developing an interest in natural disasters, researched geology and Zen Buddhism before alighting on a desire to study Japanese. If the claim is that all children require teacher input in order to learn anything at all then even Debra’s single case would prove this wrong.

However, I am not sure that anyone is making this claim. I think we are confusing the part with the whole.

For instance, I am quite clear that some children can learn to read by simply being exposed to books and a supportive environment, even if this process is not very efficient. If I start to discuss phonics on Twitter then pretty soon someone will point out to me that they learnt to read, or their child learnt to read, without systematic synthetic phonics. I suppose that I am meant to find this surprising or a refutation of my argument. I find it to be neither.
Do read the full posting and the readers' comments! :wink:
Last edited by debbie on Tue Aug 04, 2015 3:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Debbie Hepplewhite
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debbie
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Joined: Mon Oct 08, 2007 2:28 pm
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Post by debbie »

And here Tom Bennett (famous for the proliferating 'researchED' conferences) writes about self-directed learning in the TES (online Times Educational Supplement):


https://www.tes.co.uk/news/blog/tom-ben ... e-research
Tom Bennett: 'Sugata Mitra and the Hole in the Research'

Claims that pupils can teach themselves seven years ahead of their ages just don't add up, says Tom Bennett

1st August 2015
Unfortunately, Donald Clark has fairly comprehensively debunked many of the HOTW claims, most notably here. The allegedly miraculous learning hotspots had been largely vandalised and cannibalised; those that were left were dominated by older male children who used them not for teaching themselves Mandarin or critical race theory, but playing games and, I imagine, downloading stag flicks. It seems to me that the more outlandish the magic bullet claim in education, the more someone is willing to pay to subsidise it – and the less critical people become of it. But Mitra’s work taps into zeitgeists that are very, very groovy indeed: student-guided learning, the perpetually-approaching-but-not-quite-yet tech revolution of education, and the need to replace the ossified dogma of factory-farm learning. It’s like Ken Robinson regenerated into the next Doctor and the Sonic Screwdriver became a laptop.

His web page lists science-fiction as one of his interests. I fear this passion has bled into the research. It’s proper to play the ball, not the man, so I’ll confine my comments to pointing out that Professor Mitra has a BSc, a MSc and a PhD in physics, not cognitive psychology, education or anything apparently related to learning, classrooms or pupils. Still, feel free to have a punt, mate, everyone’s an expert in education.
Debbie Hepplewhite
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