There’s a new type of teaching method going around: Self-directed teaching ourselves.
Yep, that’s right. Instead of just learning and memorizing what the teacher tells you, you go and learn whatever you like on your own, with help from classmates as well. I recently discovered and learned about this new method of teaching through this article. This alternate way of teaching has been shown to work as with the case of a class of students who had Sergio Juárez Correa as a teacher at José Urbina López Primary School.
Sergio Juárez Correa is a teacher at the school who was unsatisfied with the way things were taught to classes, having to go through government-mandated curriculum. To him, it was boring and concluded that it was a waste of time. The test scores were poor, and even those who got good marks weren’t fully engaged in what they were learning. In 2011 he decided that this had to change, and started to search for new teaching methods.
Eventually he stumbled upon a video about the work of Sugata Mitra, a professor of educational technology who conducted experiments where he gave children access to computers. The children without any instruction managed to learn a variety of things, from DNA replication to English. After doing more research he was utterly taken in by these ideas, and on August 21, 2011 decided to try this method out.
He began by giving the students a simple question to solve by writing this on the board:
1=1.00
1/2=?
1/4=?.
At this point he could have explained the concept of fractions and decimals, but instead he walked out of the room and let the students figure it out among themselves.Eventually within a few minutes after a few mistakes and discussion the students had found the answer. With this self-directed method, Juárez Correa’s students eventually went on to have the top math and language rankings in Mexico.
This isn’t the only time this method has been used. Sugata Mitra, the man Correa had found a video of his work on experimented with this method as well. He left a computer in the slums one day to see what the kids would do with it and found that to his surprise they quickly found out how to use the machine. Eventually he decided to load a computer with molecular biology materials and set it up in a village in southern India. Selecting a small group of kids aged 10-14, Mitra told them there was interesting things on the computer and told them to take a look, and then left them alone. After 75 days of the children working out how to use a computer, Mitra returned and gave a test on molecular biology.  About one in four questions were answered correctly by the kids, and after another 75 days they started getting every other question right. That’s basically elementary students knowing how to do high school level curriculum, which is amazing.
The educational philosophy behind this method is one where it applies logic or the technology age to the classroom. The access to infinite information through computers and the web is changing how we think and communicate. This teaching method works under the principle where if you’re not the one controlling the learning, you aren’t going to learn as well.
They applied this philosophy in Finland by changing the countries elementary math curriculum from 25 pages to four and shortened the school day to an hour focusing on independence and active learning. By 2003 Finnish students climbed the rungs of the bottom rankings to reach first place among nations.
Personally, I think that this kind of teaching method is better than the way things are taught normally. A lot of the time I find that in school I just go through the motions of learning and memorizing what I’m told, only to forget most of it later. I ask myself a lot of the time about if what I’m learning will ever be used in my life, and I find that the answer is mostly no. If instead of learning the curriculum and learning whatever I like or am interested in with the help of my classmates, I can’t help but think that I could learn a lot more and actually like it, because I’m sure all of you have those days where you really don’t like what you’re learning. With self directed learning, the possibilities are endless. That’s just my opinion though. I know that some people probably wouldn’t be able to self teach themselves if they had the chance to because they’d rather just learn and do what they’re told to. This type of teaching method is starting to appear in schools worldwide, and it’s entirely student self directed. I’m not saying that today’s education system is bad, but from the article I read it seems that this way of teaching would benefit students much more.
If you want to read more on Sergio Juárez Correa and what he did to teach the students and about this teaching method, check out the article here. I strongly recommend you check it out, there’s a lot of things I found very interesting about the article. Maybe it might even inspire you to do some self directed learning on your own.
