Do less teaching - and let students take more responsibility for their education.

This is from Gever Tulley from The Tinkering School at The Education Project in Bahrain where they are exploring just how we can set up more student-led learning. Most teacher or school plan led processes are stuck in the mud.

Gever is most well known for his two TED Talks:

Five Dangerous Things For Kids and Teaching Life Lessons Through Tinkering.

Concepts discussed at a $6,000 a ticket conference are one thing.

What can regular schools learn from his experiences?

The key learning from Tinkering School that can be shared with regular schools can be summed up in one statement:

Do less teaching - and let students take more responsibility for their education.

The very same mantra was echoed two weeks later in South Africa at the Microsoft Innovative Education Forum by a high school student on the main stage.

But, how do we make this move in regular schools? Gever thinks there are three good starting points:

1. Classroom sessions can be self-directed: Start small, with projects that are discovery-based, such as taking apart an existing device, exploring it.

2. Get students used to Design Thinking: It's hard to come up with projects - use some design thinking processes so that students get better, over time, at discovering really interesting problems for which they an create solutions.

3. Provide protection: Let kids do their projects, providing some safety nets so that when they fail that failure is supported. Students should be able to take up the pieces and have another go at it, without suffering 'social harm' from their initial failures.

Bill Trayling
Student Success Resource Teacher
Simcoe County District School Board
705 733 6745
btrayling@scdsb.on.ca
www.scdsb.on.ca

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Posted via email from Trayling,'s posterous