Minimally Invasive Education

Some of the School of Mathematics spent the last training day developing our work with Minimally Invasive Education.

Background:

Minimally Invasive Education is the brainchild of Sugata Mitra. I was inspired to try it out in the Maths classroom after seeing him at the SSAT National Conference this time last year. The speech below is pretty much what we saw then:

In a nutshell, Dr Mitra put PCs in slums in India and found that young learners could teach themselves to use the computers, and in turn teach themselves almost anything just by searching online. He has since developed this idea of learner led learning in classrooms in the North East of England.

Learning Model:

A model of learning has been developed:

• A carefully worded question is posed. (I started with 'Who was Pythagoras?')
• Students are told to get into groups of their choice of around 4 children.
• One laptop per group.
• Allowed to walk around and cheat, looking at what the other groups are doing.
• Can move groups if they want to.
• No input from teacher other than some encouragement and praise.

I have found that a well worded question or seed, combined with a GCSE question to complete by the end of the lesson is a model that works well. Groups then tend to create a poster or presentation explaining what they have learnt on the topic, including the solution to the GCSE question. Two hours seems to be a good timescale, although this would depend on the group and the level of the work.

Having watched Year 7/8 pupils teach themselves about Pythagoras and how to answer GCSE questions on density (2-3 years ahead of schedule!) it seems like time to expand this idea, test it with other classes and other subjects.

Questioning:

The key to a successful MIE lesson seems to be the careful posing of the original question. Myself, Katie & Emmanuel spent some of our INSET day working on a list of questions that we think will work in the Maths department.  We came up with the following:

• Who was Pythagoras?
• What is density?
• Who was Monty Hall?
• How does interest work on a bank account?
• What about mortgages?
• Who was Leonardo of Pisa?
• What use are primes?
• How big is the biggest thing in the Universe?
• Smallest?
• What is an Octave?

We were also a little jealous as we kept getting ideas for other subjects to:

• What is superconductivity?
• Who was Napolean?
• What is global warming?
• Why do animals migrate?
• What is cubism?

Do you think this will work in your subject area? Why not have a go? Let us hear what questions you posed and how they went.

When this works it really works. As learners discover a topic for themselves and then present back their learning it becomes well embedded. A year later my class could recall Pythagoras impressively. I'm sure if this had been delivered in a more traditional and didactic manner it wouldn't have been so well recalled.

Here's a brief presentation we had prepared:

Thanks to Emmanuel & Katie for their help and inspiration.