Professor Sugata Mitra, winner of the 2013 TED Prize for his educational research on Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLEs), will lead a lesson activity challenging students from George Stephenson High School in Newcastle, United Kingdom to work with students from Randolph High School in Randolph Township, New Jersey to collaboratively answer a “big question” that he will pose during the lesson. The lesson launches a new SOLE Center in the United Kingdom that will support Mitra’s continued research, funded through the TED Prize, supporting his vision of building a school in a cloud where students can explore and learn from one another.
Professor Mitra’s work focuses on the power that students can bring to their own learning. His experiments, from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy to the USA demonstrate how students’ curiosities and experiences, supported by the Internet as a research tool, could revolutionize how we think about teaching. Children can teach themselves and learn from each other when motivated by curiosity, peer interest and big questions. Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLEs) are becoming an important strategy for educators around the world to energize students across curriculum areas while creating a global platform for students and teachers to answer questions together.
While students work together to communicate and research the answers to “big questions” — the underlying partnerships that create this opportunity are formed through a commitment to innovation and student success. Randolph Township School District has invested in building the infrastructure of 21st century learning. The school leaders of Randolph High School and George Stephenson High School have created the environments that encourage independent thinking and collaboration. Newcastle University, where Sugata Mitra is a Professor of Educational Technology, has been an inspirational hub in facilitating connections between educators and students. The plan is for many more collaborative SOLE experiences to be taking place for Randolph High School students in the weeks and months ahead.
Teq has played a major role in recognizing the importance of Self-Organized Learning Environments and helping to support educators as they create these opportunities for their teachers and students. Teq’s Chief Learning Officer, Joe Dixon, met with Professor Mitra in London last summer to begin a dialogue on how Teq can support this work. Teq has worked with the Randolph Township Schools to help bring their vision for 21st learning to reality. Teq is currently working to create opportunities for school districts around the U.S. to join exciting collaboratives to secure grant funding related bringing SOLE opportunities to their school districts.
