What can the West learn from the Developing World about education? #Fixit

There is a slightly outdated, though stubbornly enduring, perception that education in the West is the hallmark of excellence and that the developing world still has a lot of catching up to do. Whilst this may be the case in some areas, it is by no means true across the board and excellence and best practice can be seen within the developing world, despite, and because of, the many challenges and limited resources. As my contribution to the #Fixit debate I am going to argue that there is a great deal that we can learn from the developing world and we have no room for complacency and I'm going to draw upon the thoughts of two experts.

The first is Sugata Mitra, Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University and winner of the TED Prize 2013, and the second is Adam Braun who builds and runs schools in the developing world through his non-profit organization,Pencils of Promise. Their recent collaboration on Microsoft’s Work Wonders project brought forth five insights as part of a TED discussion from their own experience of how the West can learn from the education systems of the developing world, where innovative approaches are adapted in the face of need:

1. Children can be teachers: In classrooms in the West, there is still ostensibly an assumption that the teacher is the expert and the students are there to learn. However, the actual act of teaching is a powerful learning experience in itself and Sugata Mitra has formalized this in his SOLE (Self-Organized Learning Environment) programme, where students teach each other, without the mediation of a teacher. The student as teacher is a common feature of some classrooms in the developing world, often because of the mix of age groups and ability and also the large class sizes.
2. Movement and Learning: How many times do we remember being told to sit up straight and sit still? This actually runs counter to scientific evidence which shows that brain activity increases after physical activity. So the rather chaotic environment of a classroom in the developing world can be more conducive to proactive learning, because of the lack of desks and equipment requiring movement and activity, rather than rigid motionless concentration.
3. Limited Resources Necessitate Cooperation: When there is one computer and five children, they learn to cooperate and work together, rather than sit isolated in their own world with a computer to themselves and little reason to interact with the person sitting next to them.
4. Reading Together Aids Comprehension: As with the previous point, Sugata Mitra noticed that when students read something together from the Internet on a large screen, then their comprehension increases because of the collective input, rather than the solitary act of reading that is encouraged in the West.
5. Using Symbols Helps Learning: Progress has been made in encouraging students to develop a form of sign language to assist them in their reading, because learning is both a visual and auditory experience, but by adding symbols this brings in the spatial plane as well.

What can we do to #Fixit?

These are some deceptively powerful insights that could deliver a handful of tangible gains within the classroom, but what actions can we take to utilize the points mentioned here?

• Encourage more opportunities for students to teach each other in small groups – something I tried when teaching core mathematics with a very mixed ability and multinational group of students. The results were encouraging.
• Encourage more movement and activity, at regular intervals and during break time. Often the requirement to retain rigid discipline magnifies minor infractions, but if you tolerate a greater degree of movement and noise, there may be learning benefits for the group.
• Switch of a few computers! Encourage a group of five to cluster around the computer and come up with cooperate a collaborative approaches to issues, rather than solitary silo learning. This may also encourage the movement and activity as well.
• Group reading. This links to the previous point: try and raise levels of comprehension by encouraging the grouped approach to computer work.
• Sign Language. A number of schools already teach sign language anyway, but for early years learning, also encouraging students to develop signs as an aide memoire for difficult words may encourage a higher level of comprehension and language skills.

Some of these ideas are already being implemented in classrooms, but they are valuable insights from two acknowledged experts. Sugata Mitra has actually made a valuable point that it is actually not entirely about what we can learn from the developing world, but more correctly, “What can children teach us about learning?”

Written by Will Trevor - Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Picture Credit: By Godot13 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons