An Interview with Sugata Mitra
Eye on the World: You say that when children are learning on computers with the Internet in unsupervised groups and in a self-organised way, you have found the most effective group size to be four to five children. Do you think this size of group applies to all forms of learning?
Sugata: “I don’t know. The reason I say four or five is that children eventually formed themselves into groups of four or five when we observed them in the field during the Hole in the Wall investigation where no one was saying how many should be grouped together. It always started with hundreds of children but after a few days, they’d formed themselves into small groups of four or five. I suspect it’s the geometry of the computer that causes this. Having said that, it doesn’t prevent children looking over the shoulders of others, but they may not be actively participating.
In schools I’ve worked in, I’ll say ‘if you think someone’s found something interesting, you can go and look and then come back into a small group again.’ Large groups will appear around one computer as something interesting is discovered, just like birds flocking, and then they will disperse. But they might not always return to the same four children in the group. It’s definitely a dynamic thing going on.
To teachers I say try different types and sizes of groups to find what works best and don’t worry about it when one group situation doesn’t work out so well. This way you’ll find the best group for the type of learning that’s going on.
EOTW: What seems to be the reason for this as an optimum group size?
Sugata: Even with a big screen computer, the best number of children to work in a group to learn will not increase over four or five (This is based on my research with nine and ten year olds but could also apply to other ages too). In this size of group my observations indicate that one child operates the computer with the children taking turns to do this, another child is analysing and deciding where to go, the third child is evaluating the material and the fourth child often acts as a harmoniser, saying things like of like ‘hang on, I think we’re getting there’; they’ll be providing a balance across the whole group. So you’ve got specific roles: a doer, an analyser and so on and the children take on those roles almost naturally and interchange the roles in a very fluid way.
EOTW: Has your research found that every child in that group of four or five gains from this approach to learning?
Sugata: Yes they do, but some children may gain differently. Our regular education system (particularly talking about the UK) says that’s not good. The big question is, is the education system wrong? That’s a different debate. This Victorian system of learning ensured a uniform quality of mediocrity, but remember that’s what the Victorian system required. Today our society has totally different objectives and it’s the responsibility of the teacher to make a judgement on each child and their learning progress.
If one child in the group hasn’t learnt something, that’s when the teacher can bring in the rest of the group, encouraging them to help by saying ‘come on guys, we need to help this child. What can we do to help him understand?’
EOTW: What advice do you give to teachers to help them support self-organised, child-led learning? What do you suggest teachers can do and what do you suggest teachers can say to encourage their children during this form of learning?
Sugata: Firstly you’ve got to trust the children. You can’t pretend to trust; children can see through pretended trust (comments like ‘darling, look how good you are’!) The trust has to be genuine.
Second, if a child is lagging behind, seek the help of his or her peers. Bring the problem up-front. Make the child feel good - that it’s ok to be in this learning situation - and then get the rest of the group into an environment to help the teacher to achieve the objective. The teacher should open up to the children about what he or she needs help with. And then - a slightly more difficult job for a teacher - step back.
EOTW: When it comes to computer-based learning, how many computers do you believe a school needs to create the best opportunity for maximum learning? Is it necessary to have one computer per child?
Sugata: It of course depends on how many classes and how many children. But if they do one session with the computers per week with one computer for every four children and say the formula for each class is 20 children, then you need five computers for one day per week for that class. Therefore in a whole week within that school, five computers can serve 100 children.
Do not use one laptop for each child. I think I have enough evidence to show that children on their own don’t make anywhere near the same amount of progress in their learning. Even something as simple as reading from the screen, in a group of four, the children learn more that way.
Get computers with nice big screens, not tiny little laptops. And get good Internet access.
EOTW: You have talked about encouraging aspiration in children, especially aspiring to subjects like science, engineering and mathematics. How do you believe teachers and Headteachers can encourage this aspiration?
Sugata: My work in the North East of England has involved exposing children to people whose work is interesting and cool. I used TED.com (www.ted.com). You have to choose carefully, but each video is only 20 minutes long and there are some really interesting people talking about their really interesting work on there. Get the children to watch the entire 20 minute video and then research, in groups of four, anything about what they’ve seen on the video that they found interesting. You’d be amazed at what they research. Based on my observations, just eight exposures to selected videos impacts the aspiration of a nine year old child. It has a lot of impact. It may get better if you watch more, but if you simply pick one video per week over a period of just a few weeks, it can make a big difference.
After one session with TED, I had one child say to me “so what do I have to do to be like that?” And my answer was “it’s not very hard. You just have to want to do it. You have the computer, you just have to do a bit of math and science, but you’re good at that.” Don’t say things like ‘you have to work really hard’. Children need to believe that they can do it.
The media has a big role to play in aspiration. The media’s heroes are celebrities and criminals. Is that what we want our children to be? What about a doctor saving a life? Why doesn’t the media make them the celebrities? But not to focus on the illness or the equipment; the media should be focusing on the person; the surgeon. That should be the story. We need to change our heroes a little bit. That could go a long, long way to changing aspiration, and aspiration is a key to our society.
EOTW: You have said that “if you have Google, do you need an education?” Do you agree with this question? Doesn’t Google just help to provide knowledge? What about skills and understanding?
Sugata: It was rather a facetious question! I developed that question based upon another device in another age – the calculator. The question with the calculator was: do we really need to learn arithmetic when we can just push the buttons to get the answer? What we do know is, what’s important to education changes over time. If we brought back someone from 2,000 years ago they may think that what we’re teaching children is poor because we’re not teaching children key survival skills – how to light a fire, how to stay warm and alive. But that’s because we know these skills aren’t required any more. We’ve worked hard as a society to create a society where these skills are no longer required. The question is, what do we need to know now? And sometimes we don’t need to know the ‘how’ but just the ‘why’. It’s easy to get hung up on skills but some skills get automated and then become irrelevant. For example taking someone’s blood pressure used to be a skill but now a machine does that for us. Today more and more of our furniture is modular so do we need so many carpenters? In 20 years’ time we’ll have created a boiler that will tell us what’s needed to fix it when it goes wrong; in 40 years’ time the boilers will probably fix themselves. So do we need so many skilled plumbers? It’s actually the skills of a designer who can design these things that will probably be one of the most important skills for the next generation.
Teachers should be watching children very carefully to figure out who are the designers, the managers, etc. You can see it in their faces, in their eyes, their actions. It’s so important to keep in mind that these children are the architects of what the future will be. That’s a big responsibility for a teacher. It’s not a minor job being a teacher!
EOTW: You have watched children learning in many different environments and in many different ways. How can we get all children engaged in their learning?
Sugata: When it comes to children learning, engagement is vital but the way children engage is beyond most adult’s imaginations. Here’s an example: In a class that I was observing in China, one little girl was on her back with her legs in the air. I asked myself, is this girl learning anything? When I asked her, she knew everything that had been going on in that lesson. A nine year old girl’s brain can read a computer screen upside down while she’s lying with her legs in the air! A similar thing happened in New Delhi with a boy who was like a whirling dervish. He was all over the place and we were doing some really hard questions on the computer about the brain. You’d have thought he wasn’t taking anything in and then he asked a brilliant question, totally related to the work we were focusing on. This sends an important message to teachers: don’t restrict children too much. Don’t underestimate their abilities. As a teacher, think that they can, rather than they can’t. Children can learn, in all sorts of environments far beyond the traditional classroom one.
EOTW: You have said recently that we need a curriculum “that is driven by questions, that is self-organised and self-populating”. Can you explain your thoughts a little further?
Sugata: I believe that the best learning is dependent on the questions that you ask. Here’s an example: In Hong Kong, working with a teacher, we made up a question to 13 and 14 year olds with the goal of getting them interested in trigonometry. It was a brilliant question. The question was ‘How does an iPad know where it is?’ That engaged the children immediately! They got into groups of four to research the answer. They were quickly able to answer that it’s the iPad’s GPS and three satellites. So then the teacher asked ‘why three satellites, not two?’ Through a few simple questions from the teacher, the children were able to come up with the fact that they triangulate. At this point the teacher then said ‘would you like to know how to do that?’ All of a sudden the reason for learning trigonometry became real life.
This teacher found a question that captured the interests of all the children. The secret was in taking a big, broad, deep question that had great relevance for them. Out of their responses to this big question, you can then find a hook to lead into the curriculum and doing it this way, the children will feel a sense of ownership of their learning.
We could take our entire curriculum and for each topic of each subject we could find a deep question that could create engagement.
EOTW: In your research, have there been any particular areas of learning that you have found children to be especially interested in when they work independently? And have you found any areas of learning that are gender specific or age specific?
Sugata: After an intensive 40 minutes of group researching, when they go back to their classroom and have time to do something independently, children tend to start drawing. The brains seem to convert their thinking into colours and patterns.
Regarding gender, very strangely from what I’ve observed, girls and boys don’t naturally tend to want to work together between ages 8 and 16. Girls cluster together as do boys. Girls learn differently to boys; girls are much more intuitive in their approach whereas boys are more investigative. Therefore, I make no attempt to mix groups. The way boys and girls choose their groups is through natural selection and, I believe there’s a lesson for us there. That there’s not much to be gained by women being forced to behave like men and vice versa because it goes against their natural preference.
EOTW: You have been awarded many honours including Best Social Innovation of the Year 2000 and Man for Peace Award 2002. How do you feel about receiving such prestigious awards?
Sugata: It makes me feel nervous and anxious. It is a good feeling standing on the stage receiving an award but I do question what gives me the right to be there. I think ‘who am I to affect the lives of children?’ I’ve worked with more than 1 million children in the last 12 years and it makes me think ‘do I have the right to affect them?’
