Greg Ashman & Tom Bennett write about 'self-directed lea
Posted: Tue Aug 04, 2015 3:21 pm
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/
https://gregashman.wordpress.com/2015/0 ... -learning/
Do read the full posting and the readers' comments!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.