The radical new teaching method: Let kids teach themselves

[John]

How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses

Ricardo Zavala Hernandez, assistant principal at José Urbina López, drinks a cup of coffee most mornings as he browses the web in the admin building, a cement structure that houses the school’s two functioning computers. One day in September 2012, he clicked on the site for ENLACE, Mexico’s national achievement exam, and discovered that the results of the June test had been posted.

Zavala Hernandez put down his coffee. Most of the classes had done marginally better this year—but Paloma’s grade was another story. The previous year, 45 percent had essentially failed the math section, and 31 percent had failed Spanish. This time only 7 percent failed math and 3.5 percent failed Spanish. And while none had posted an Excellent score before, 63 percent were now in that category in math.

The language scores were very high. Even the lowest was well above the national average. Then he noticed the math scores. The top score in Juárez Correa’s class was 921. Zavala Hernandez looked over at the top score in the state: It was 921. When he saw the next box over, the hairs on his arms stood up. The top score in the entire country was also 921.

He printed the page and speed-walked to Juárez Correa’s classroom. The students stood up when he entered.

“Take a look at this,” Zavala Hernandez said, handing him the printout.

Juárez Correa scanned the results and looked up. “Is this for real?” he asked.

“I just printed it off the ENLACE site,” the assistant principal responded. “It’s real.”

Juárez Correa noticed the kids staring at him, but he wanted to make sure he understood the report. He took a moment to read it again, nodded, and turned to the kids.

“We have the results back from the ENLACE exam,” he said. “It’s just a test, and not a great one.”

A number of students had a sinking feeling. They must have blown it.

“But we have a student in this classroom who placed first in Mexico,” he said, breaking into a smile.

Paloma received the highest math score in the country, but the other students weren’t far behind. Ten got math scores that placed them in the 99.99th percentile. Three of them placed at the same high level in Spanish.

How did Sergio Juárez Correa do it? How did he turn a group of poor students at a primary school located next to a dump along the Mexico-U.S. border into some of the top performers in all of Mexico? He asked them, "What do you want to learn?" Then he got out of their way and let them learn it.

That's a radical departure from typical school curriculum that centers around drilling facts and figures into kids heads, the better that they may turn in good test scores. Teachers get judged by their students test scores, so the incentive to "teach to the test" is plain. But Mr. Juárez Correa believes he has a better way, and the results indicate that he's on to something.

Mr. Juárez Correa began his experimentation by presenting his children with a problem. His natural instinct was to guide them through the solving of the problem. Instead, he left the room and allowed the children to talk it out amongst themselves. When he returned, they had the answer. They had self-organized, talked it over, and reasoned it out. And Mr. Juárez Correa began to realize an important truth: people learn more readily when they self-direct than when they are drilled by someone else.

Read the Wired piece for more details. It's truly fascinating. I'm a big believe in the importance of self-direction in learning and growth, so these results speak to me. If you buy what is being sold here, consider that it's not just a theory to be applied in a classroom. This is a practice you can use at home with your children. Give your child an answer and you solve a short-term problem, but you also create a long-term problem by teaching dependency. Encourage your child to explore answers on his/her own and you're promoting self-direction, which can only benefit the child down the road.

[Matt]

I have long believed that teaching children is not about teaching them facts and memorization for a test. And every teacher in the world will tell you that what we are presently doing in our public schools with standardized tests is horse crap. It made our problems in public education ten times worse. On top of that, the federal system rewards schools that do well on these tests, and punishes schools that do poorly, when common sense (not to mention human decency) would suggest that those schools doing poorly are in need of more resources, not less.

A teacher's job is to teach children to learn. It's to open their minds and guide them to explore new ideas. Open a child's imagination and they will learn on their own. And the simple skill of learning will benefit them the remainder of their lives. Bore or frustrate a child, and they will close their minds. It's not just about dependency. It's about their own sense of self worth as well.

[roncollins]

Workplace corollary ... the best way to make anything work better is to ensure leadership sets a clear target and then gets the heck out of the way.

[Rory]

I have long believed that teaching children is not about teaching them facts and memorization for a test. And every teacher in the world will tell you that what we are presently doing in our public schools with standardized tests is horse crap. It made our problems in public education ten times worse. On top of that, the federal system rewards schools that do well on these tests, and punishes schools that do poorly, when common sense (not to mention human decency) would suggest that those schools doing poorly are in need of more resources, not less.

A teacher's job is to teach children to learn. It's to open their minds and guide them to explore new ideas. Open a child's imagination and they will learn on their own. And the simple skill of learning will benefit them the remainder of their lives. Bore or frustrate a child, and they will close their minds. It's not just about dependency. It's about their own sense of self worth as well.

Amen Brotha

[Arroyos]

How many times in the course of my 30 years of teaching has someone been credited with discovering a "radical" new method of teaching by letting humans do what humans naturally do, learn?

When I was a brand-spanking new composition teacher, I was assigned an "innovative" article on teaching that advocated getting out of the way and letting learners learn. That was 1972.

During graduate school, I read a half dozen books and articles advocating the same thing, all written early in the 20th C.

In 1982 I was invited to give a teaching presentation at a local elementary school in Fort Worth. I demo-ed an exercise that had the kids writing descriptions as part of a game we played. The veteran teachers were amazed. "How did you get them all to write so much?" they asked. Stay out of the way, I said, and let them play. To the teachers it seemed like a radical concept, but it was nothing more than an old hat I'd borrowed from teachers who preceded me.

In the 90s, while composition director at UNLV, I was part of a conference panel that discussed how the less we do as writing teachers, the more our students learn. Some criticized the panel's irresponsible attitude, others championed our vision as "radical" and "revolutionary." Most of our ideas had come from Alfred North Whitehead's book Aims of Education, published in 1922.

Just before the turn of the century, when I was teaching at the University of Alaska Southeast, I had a colleague who had a mantra for his own discovery of a new method of teaching: he no longer professed to be "the sage on the stage," but he aspired to be "a guide on the side." Same old same old, in a new package.

And now, here we are again, recycling the same "radical" new ideas about learning. It's amazing how we continue to surprise ourselves with the same old truths. The brain evolved to learn. Let it do its thing. Or as Whitehead put it, "The pupil's mind is a growing organism ... it is not a box to be ruthlessly packed with alien ideas."

I wonder who will be next to "discover" this radical new approach to teaching.

Maybe I should retire before this particular wheel comes full circle again.

[roncollins]

Exactly, Bob. For some unknown reason, it's human nature to ignore things we know are true if they get in the way of us doing something we want to do. Teachers want to be aggressive, they want something in themselves to be the thing that starts the fire (which is understandable). And parents without patience, or apparently without belief in their kids, put unbearable pressure on teachers to "just do something" that will get their kid working harder. Yet, when you just sit back and talk about the situation, so many people will nod their head and agree how valuable it is to let kids come about their learning in natural fashions. These people all have personal stories about times where they learned something on their own, or studied something only because they thought it was fascinating. Then they get back to the real world and demand that kids go through the wringer of standard, set curriculum and mandated homework and testing.

It's a very strange world we live in. Very strange.