As we look forward to the 50th IATEFL conference in April 2016, I am thinking back to April 2014 in Harrogate, when Sugata Mitra gave his very controversial talk called “The Future of Learning” which got reactions like “Did he just say that teachers are obsolete?”, “Students can learn from the internet?”, “All you need are grannies?!!”, “How dare he suggest that teachers aren’t needed!!”, “SOLE, SOLE? He doesn’t know what he’s talking about!”, “Charlatan!!”.
The talk divided the audience so much that half of them stood up and walked out, taking to twitter to vent their anger while the other half were still in the auditorium giving the speaker a standing ovation. I watched the recorded talk later that week. Interesting. Inspirational. Controversial. An engaging and thought-provoking talk which was followed by many blog posts and tweets accusing Mitra of having a neo-liberal agenda, of being an idealist and not an educator and anti-teacher. Personally, I took away three things from the talk:
- A good education (including good teachers) should be available for all – no matter where you live in the world.
- Teaching conditions should be of high-quality even in the remotest, most deprived parts of the world.
- Teaching methods and approaches need to change to reflect the ever changing world we live in. Everything else has changed but our schools are still stuck in the 1900s.
- We’re not preparing our children with the right kind of skills/education they need to survive in today’s world.
What is SOLE?
SOLE stands for Self Organised Learning Environment. In a SOLE teachers attempt to spark curiosity by asking children to explore a big question, using the Internet and working together in small groups. Towards the end of the session each group is then invited to present their findings to the rest of the class.
There are a number important features of SOLE that have emerged that help to maximise its effectiveness. Firstly, the ‘big question’ plays a prominent role and when a relevant and challenging question is posed many children do respond positively and engage in the lesson. Secondly, the SOLE approach enables teachers to integrate the use of the internet into the lesson in a safe and constructive manner. Finally, the teacher is expected to stand back and play a much more minimal role in the lesson, enabling children to collaborate and seek out the answers themselves. The teacher therefore becomes much more of a facilitator.
Intrigued, I contacted Professor Mitra at Newcastle University, home of SOLE Central, in the hope of getting an interview for the International House, London teachers’ blog. He was not available as he had already given a number of interviews. So I suggested we try the SOLEs method with adult English language learners because until then SOLEs had only been used with children. Surprisingly they agreed and this is what happened:
We spent eight months putting together a plan of how we were going to attempt SOLE with adults. There were a lot of things that needed to be taken into consideration: the students, the school and its reputation, the teachers and their reaction. Were they going to think I was trying to replace them with computers? Did we want to get involved in something so controversial? After a Q&A meeting with the teachers, the school Director and Sugata Mitra to reassure everyone that this was research, we started working on the next stage.
- Students: they had to be new to the school and not attending any other English lessons. The students were enrolled through our teacher training department. They were all living in London and paid a minimal fee to attend lessons and none attended lessons elsewhere. 19 students in total, all pre-intermediate and from different parts of the world.
- Teachers: one was very experienced, DELTA qualified and doing an MA TESOL and the other was a newly qualified CELTA teacher with about 3 months of teaching experience.
- Room layout and equipment: The room was cleared of all desks and chairs and we furnished it with soft seating, coffee tables, plants, and a tea/coffee station. It also had four laptops, pens, poster paper and the board and IWB for students to use.
- Big questions: We came up with twenty big questions that the students would be asked to answer every day.
- Lessons: We decided that we would run the lessons Monday – Friday for four weeks. Each lesson was 90 minutes long and every lesson was filmed so that we could watch what happened when the teacher was out of the room.
Both students and teachers were asked to keep a journal and write down their thoughts whenever they wanted to during the course. The students were not great at doing this, even in their L1. Both teachers kept a record of how they felt after each lesson.
One of our main worries was that these were adult students, they had been through an education system in their own country and had fixed ideas of what the teacher’s role is and what a typical lesson is like. There was also the question of self-organising. In Sugata’s work with children, they organise themselves into groups without instructions to do so. Would this work with adults? Would they come together as one big group or would they arrange themselves into smaller groups?
A meeting was arranged with the students a week before we started the classes.I explained to them that the lessons were going to be different to what they had experienced before without telling them how the lessons would be different. They were asked to take a placement test, which they would retake at the end of the four weeks to measure progress.
What happened next was something quite extraordinary…
Feeling apprehensive, nervous, excited and unsure how the students would react and if they would engage with questions we’d set, we started SOLEs. The teacher was desperate to pre-teach lexis. How would pre-intermediate students understand the question? I managed to convince him that this was not possible. Surprisingly the students worked out the meaning of unknown words between themselves. We told them they had 40 minutes to find out the answer and we would return for the presentations. The learners were all quite shocked when we left them. What we found when we returned to the classroom was quite incredible. The students had self-organised into smaller groups and were busy working on their presentations. They actually asked for more time to finish their work. Their presentations were good with every group having different, interesting answers and everyone participating. The teacher encouraged questions from the other students.
The following two lessons were the same, but by the fourth lesson I sensed a little frustration from one student in particular. I asked him what was wrong and he quite clearly was not happy without a teacher. He also thought the lessons needed more variety with error correction and pronunciation. We responded by changing Friday’s lesson from a question to a task to find three apps to help improve your pronunciation. Unfortunately, the student did not attend this lesson. He came back for one more day before giving up and was the only student to drop out of the course.
In weeks two and three we decided to introduce a CAE reading and a CAE Use of English paper. Sugata Mitra gives reading texts to the children he works with. The only condition is that the text has to be four levels above the students’ comprehension. We left copies of these in the room for the students to complete. Again students organised themselves into groups and did the tasks. To our amazement, the groups got almost all the answers right. Yes, they were working collaboratively and using the internet but these were pre-intermediate students answering advanced level exam questions correctly!
As we reached weeks three and four we found the presentations becoming longer, more sophisticated, with every member of each group eager to speak. The students engaged with all but one of the big questions. They didn’t like “Identify the best and the worst place to live in the world giving reasons to justify each location.”
Findings
As the weeks progressed we saw all the learners’ confidence and fluency soar, and received feedback like this from the students:
“I believe the course has been good for improve my English. Maybe I make the same mistake of before, but I learned new words and I’m more confident speaking. I think my speaking is more fluently than before and I’m happy about it!
The two teachers involved in this pilot also changed their views of what the teacher’s role is, choosing to apply what they learned from this to their own teaching by reducing intervention and allowing students to work more independently.
There are still a lot of questions that need answering about using this approach with language learners… How do we measure progress? How do we incorporate all four skills and pronunciation? What is the teacher’s role?
The main thing that’s struck me is that a SOLE is not about technology replacing the teacher. It’s about questioning and redefining the role of the teacher in the 21st century.
The full report on this pilot is available to read here:
Varinder Unlu
I have worked in ELT for 25 years in many different contexts from private language schools to FE and HE, teaching students from 6-80 years old. I have been a DOS/Academic Manager since 2002 and I have been working at International House, London since 2010 as Director of Studies. I am also a teacher trainer for CELTA and Trinity.
Thanks for sharing this really interesting project. There must be such a thing as ‘over-teaching’!
Hi Karen. It is an interesting project which has raised a lot of important questions about the way we teach our students and the way we train our teachers. I do think there is often a lot of over-teaching. By stepping back allowing students to process information and allowing them to become more autonomous can only make learning more meaningful.
hi
i was reading the pdf report and wondering how the classes were split up between Facilitator A and Facilitator B? as according to SOLE the framing of the question is important so would the personalities and behaviour of the facilitators need to be accounted for?
also was the nationality of the student who was unhappy and dropped out French? ; )
ta
mura
Hi Mura
We didn’t use any specific method to split the classes between the two teachers except I wanted there to be an even split between the two of them. You’re right that personalities may change the way students responds in a regular class but here both were asked to come in set the question and then leave the students to find the answers. They both had exactly the same instructions from the start. No teaching of lexis, no explaining meanings of words, no pronunciation or error correction. Just facilitating.
I chose two very different teachers on purpose so that I could get feedback from an experienced and a less experienced teacher.
The student who dropped out was actually Italian.
Thanks so much for sharing this fascinating experiment. It’s very reinforcing and exciting to see that adults have not ‘outgrown’ the natural sense of curiosity and desire to explore that children display.
Do you see teachers using SOLE as an overarching pedagogical worldview/methodology in the classroom? Do you think that SOLE can work in a more pedagogically eclectic environment?
Thank you Randi. I found the whole thing fascinating. We were not sure of what to expect with adult learners and were pleasantly surprised by how they got on with it everyday and seemed to be enjoying it.
The results of this one trial were inconclusive and there is still much more work to be done before I can say with any confidence that teachers will be using this methodology in the classroom. I think from this one trial there were some interesting points raised about teacher intervention and if and when it’s really needed. There is so much over-teaching happening in classrooms and it takes attention away from the learning. What is the learning taking away from the teaching? As we know, we all work at our own pace and take in different things from the same lesson. Here because the learners were in charge of finding the answers themselves and not being guided by a teacher, they picked up what was important to them.
This article states that “[The students] were asked to take a placement test, which they would retake at the end of the four weeks to measure progress.”
Unless I’m missing something, the article does not provide the results of the pre and post tests which is surely the best way to assess the efficacy of the method. Did the post test not happen for some reason?
Hello Janet
The results of the test are in the actual report to which there is a link at the end of the post. We gave the students a reading comprehension too. You will see that there wasn’t any remarkable difference in the results but I wouldn’t expect to see much difference after four weeks.
SOLE seems like a productive and effective alternative teaching method for the 21st century. I completely agree with its core method and objectives. I’ve been becoming more of a facilitator in the classroom by giving students more class time (adult learners) for conversation. With this has come a lot of improvement in confidence and fluency. Many of my students appreciate this time to share ideas and information with their peers, while at the same time they appreciate having a chance to practice their conversational skills. I’m all about the 80-20 rule in the classroom. You can read more about how to making room for conversation at http://www.eslmadeeasy.ca
Hi Carolyn
Thank you for the link. I will take a look. It’s interesting what you say about giving learners more time. I strongly believe in allowing students thinking time and not rushing them through an activity just so the teacher can move on to the next thing on their lesson plan.
One of the many things students appreciated about SOLEs was that they could talk about adult topics (their words, not mine), and things that affected them such as the financial crisis. Doing this in groups without a teacher also helped them to express what they wanted to say rather than what a teacher was feeding to them. It was less forced and more natural.
I’m pretty sure some of the concepts you have tried out in this pilot and the ideas expressed by Prof Mitra will have relevance as we try to extend access to resources and quality tutoring through online courses to students in developing countries. The fact that webinars and online classrooms & courses are now a viable way to take teaching where it has not been able to reach is an opportunity, not a threat. There’s a lot of work to be done, but we should not be frightened of radical thinking in how we adapt methodology in a fast changing world. Thanks for shariing this.
Really interesting. Thank you!
Thank you Vicki.
Thank you for sharing how SOLE was applied at the International House, London, in developing and conducting a course for adult language learners. I teach at a university in Okinawa, Japan, and actually use a method somewhat similar to SOLE in my British Life, Society and Culture course. The “big questions”, however, are all related not only to internet resources but also the wealth and variety of reading materials I give the students at our weekly class meetings. I give them a list of 15 to 20 questions which they must work together to answer. Due to the large number of students in the class (up to 50 or more) and the greatly differing ability levels (from “false beginners” to advanced) I have sometimes assigned students to groups so that each group would have mixed levels. I have also let them organize their own groups. It is my experience that they definitely prefer the latter option. Due to the large class we have not always had time for group reports but I do like that option and would like to revise what I do in order to be able to include that, I think your researchers were correct in that this must help raise the confidence level of the students. One final note; we are together for 15 weeks, one 90-minute class per week. Thank you again for introducing SOLE.
Thank you for sharing your interesting project. I teach Swedish to migrants and refugees, the course comprising of 15 hours a week for a year. Learners come from various backgrounds, educationwise and cultural. They have not heard the language before and are enrolled in a compulsory formal ed course ( required by govt) and must pass national exams in all Four proficiences. Would SOLE serve their needs?
Thank you for this very interesting report. I am definitely going to try and implement some of these ideas in my classes.
However, I believe that in my particular teaching environment (my students all have the same L1 – German, and I only teach them 2 hours/week – usually evening classes) SOLE is not the best option.
First, whenever I ask students to talk about a certain topic in English, I constantly have to remind them not to talk in their L1. And in the break, when I leave the room, not a word of English is heard – ONLY German! The problem here definitely is that they all feel more confident in their L1, and they all understand the same L1. I once had a group where one of the students didn’t speak German – there, at least in the classroom, the students made more of an effort to “stay” in English rather than switching back to German all the time.
Secondly, would this approach also be useful for helping to improve students’ listening comprehension skills? This is a field I find most of my (pre-intermediate & intermediate) students have serious problems with. The report only mentions reading tasks.
Finally, how satisfied were the students with what they “got for their money”? I know this is more of an issue for the marketing department of the school, but I imagine it is quite difficult to sell a course where the teacher is not present most of the time – at least here in Austria. I, for my part, can definitely understand the “drop-out” student’s reaction. Before I became a teacher myself (i.e. during my school career and university), I used to consider teachers who set a lot of “self study” tasks to the class as lazy and unwilling to teach – hence “bad” teachers. And I still believe that some of those teachers really were lazy. So it might be hard to make students understand that the teacher is actually “working” while he is not present… I am thinking on a large scale here, not just a trial group of 19 students, but language schools with hundreds of students. I could imagine that a language student who signs up for a 2-week-course in Britain or Malta, for example, for some 500 Euros or more, will be quite disappointed and frustrated to find that the teacher he is paying a fortune to is not even present most of the time…
Again, I am not saying that SOLE is not useful – I find it a great idea and will try it! But I somehow doubt it’s applicable on the large scale, and particularly in monolingual groups (i.e. all students have the same L1).
Best regards from Austria
Thank you for this Varinder. It’s a very interesting project. SOLE reminds us that any learning takes place because of the learner, not the teacher (although I take Mitra’s comments about no more teachers as more a case of the role of a ‘teacher’ changing rather than disappearing altogether). A replication of this project in the more common environment of a school in a country where English is not the medium and contact with English is more limited would be very interesting indeed and would validate this process much more. I look forward to someone taking the plunge! 🙂
It was very interesting, I’ll be very happy if I get a chance to join a learning
class like that. Thanks for sharing this method in learning.