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| November 2013 Issue of Wired magazine |
If you have not picked up the November 2013 issue of Wired magazine and read the cover story,
“The Next Steve
Jobs”, then you missed out on a truly inspiring story of a teacher,
struggling to get by with little to no resources in the drug war ravaged
Mexican border region. While the star of
the article is an impoverished young girl, 12-year-old Paloma Noyola Bueno, who
responds to her teacher’s radical change in teaching methodology and becomes
one of the best students in all of Mexico, the real story is about the teacher,
Sergio Juárez Correa.
Correa struggled to reach his students and meet state testing
standards (sound familiar?) He knew that
with virtually infinite access to information online (which his students did
not have access to), the days of him being the bearer of knowledge for his
students were numbered, and it was not producing results for his students. So as Correa struggled to learn about how
teachers are changing their instruction and having tremendous success, he
decided to make a change in his classroom. So he told his students that they do
have it extremely difficult and have none of the modern advantages, such as
laptops and high speed internet, which students across the river in
Brownsville, Texas have. But he knew his
students had potential to learn and to love doing it, which often seems to be
lost on students and teachers neck deep in state and national mandates.
The methodology employed by Correa was at least partially
modeled on the pioneering and increasingly cited work of TED darling Sugata Mitra. But rather than leaving students unattended,
Correa changed his role and now took a back seat in the classroom, as his
students became investigators, cooperatively working on problems and debating
answers in order to find solutions. He
largely did this without the use of technology, and had amazing results.
Would technology have hurt or enhanced what was done is his
classroom? I think it certainly could
have assisted in enhancing a great teaching and learning environment, but I
would also argue that if Correa had unleashed his students to lookup facts
using Google, his results would not have been the same. The power was in asking the students to think
about problems and work cooperatively on solving them.
Teaching and leadership make a huge difference in student
learning – clearly shown in this story, but they also too often stifle it: sadly,
the article the quotes the chief of the Regional Center of Educational
Development in Matamoros as saying “The teaching method makes little
difference.”
This blog entry is cross posted with the great folks at SchoolCIO
