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The organization I work for, Gray Matters Capital, is focusing its efforts on a very interesting slice of education specifically catering to a low-income population. Affordable Private Schools are a widespread phenomenon across the developing world, catering especially to lower income...

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thinkmexican

Paloma Noyola: The Face of Mexico’s Unleashed Potential

When a report emerged in September 2012 that a girl from one of Matamoros’ poorest neighborhoods had attained the highest math score in Mexico, some doubted its veracity. It must be fake, they said.

But it wasn’t fake. Her name is Paloma Noyola, and what most reports failed to mention is that almost all of her classmates also scored very high on the national math test. 10 scored in the 99.99% percentile.

Paloma and her classmates also scored in the top percentile in language. Something special was happening at José Urbina López primary school in Matamoros, and Wired went to take a look.

The high test scores turned out to be the work of a young teacher who also came from humble beginnings. Sergio Juárez Correa was tired of the monotony of teaching out of a book and wanted to try something new to help engage his students when he came across the work of Sugata Mitra, a UK university professor who had innovated a new pedagogy he called SOLE, or self organized learning environments. The new approach paid off.

Although SOLE usually relies on unfettered Internet access for research, Juárez and his students had very limited access. Somehow, he still found a way to apply Mitra’s teachings and unleash their potential.

From the beginning, Paloma’s exceptional abilities were evident:

One day Juárez Correa went to his whiteboard and wrote “1 = 1.00.” Normally, at this point, he would start explaining the concept of fractions and decimals. Instead he just wrote “½ = ?” and “¼ = ?”

“Think about that for a second,” he said, and walked out of the room.

While the kids murmured, Juárez went to the school cafeteria, where children could buy breakfast and lunch for small change. He borrowed about 10 pesos in coins, worth about 75 cents, and walked back to his classroom, where he distributed a peso’s worth of coins to each table. He noticed that Paloma had already written .50 and .25 on a piece of paper.

As Mr. Juárez implemented more of Mitra’s teachings in his classroom, Paloma continued to stand out as an exceptionally gifted student:

Juárez Correa was impressed. But he was even more intrigued by Paloma. During these experiments, he noticed that she almost always came up with the answer immediately. Sometimes she explained things to her tablemates, other times she kept the answer to herself. Nobody had told him that she had an unusual gift. Yet even when he gave the class difficult questions, she quickly jotted down the answers. To test her limits, he challenged the class with a problem he was sure would stump her. He told the story of Carl Friedrich Gauss, the famous German mathematician, who was born in 1777.

When Gauss was a schoolboy, one of his teachers asked the class to add up every number between 1 and 100. It was supposed to take an hour, but Gauss had the answer almost instantly.

“Does anyone know how he did this?” Juárez Correa asked.

A few students started trying to add up the numbers and soon realized it would take a long time. Paloma, working with her group, carefully wrote out a few sequences and looked at them for a moment. Then she raised her hand.

“The answer is 5,050,” she said. “There are 50 pairs of 101.”

Juárez Correa felt a chill. He’d never encountered a student with so much innate ability. He squatted next to her and asked why she hadn’t expressed much interest in math in the past, since she was clearly good at it.

“Because no one made it this interesting,” she said.

Although this Wired piece focuses mostly on Sugata Mitra, it does once again highlight the story of Paloma Noyola. Unfortunately, after a brief spurt of media attention, little on Paloma was ever mentioned and, as was pointed out by Wired, nothing was ever said of Mr. Juárez.

As with most stories in the Mexican press — and those popular with the middle-class — things suddenly become very important once it’s featured in a gringo publication. Which is a very sad commentary. We hope, however, that this story pushes those in the press, state and federal government to look not to the United States for validation but to Mexicans like Sergio Juárez doing good work in places like Matamoros.

The clear message in this story is that there are thousands of Paloma Noyolas going to school in Mexico who, just like her at one time, are not being challenged and therefore aren’t very interested in school. This story can, if we want it to, raise enough awareness to shift the discussion from poverty to opportunity.

Paloma truly personifies both Mexico’s challenges and unleashed potential.

Read the entire Wired story here: How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses

Editor’s note: As an addendum, Wired provided information on helping support Sugata Mitra and his School in the Clouds project, and although they donated school supplies and equipment to José Urbina López School, we’re interested in seeing if we can help set up a similar fund for Sergio Juárez, the teacher featured in this story.

Also, $9,300 was raised to help fund Paloma’s education last year. We’re going to follow up with the economist who led the fundraising campaign to see how she’s doing. Stay tuned for the updates.

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tedsole-blog

After watching a TED talk video by Sugata Mitra, I was inspired to try something new in our class. This week the class participated in a SOLE (Student Organized Learning Environment). Each group was given an iPad and a challenging question to respond to independently. The grade fours were asked “Were the Middle Ages really the Dark Ages?” and the grade threes were asked “How did physical geography and natural resources affect where the pioneers choose to settle in Canada?” The groups took different approaches and worked cooperatively. They were incredibly engaged. To follow are the posters they made to communicate their findings. I am hoping to be able show the videos we made of their presentations.

Cori Nolette

Deep River, Canada

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infamoussayings

If children know there is someone standing over them knows all the answers, they are less inclined to find the answers for themselves.

Sugata Mitra (via infamoussayings)

halfeducated

Sugata Mitra. Self-teaching.

You can add a link, video, create a poster using Recite This, or maybe even an example of something created with the digital tool! Have fun.

#padlet #online tools

inquirybasedlearning

A great IBL resource on Pinterest - http://www.pinterest.com/explore/inquiry-based-learning/

#inquiry learning #inquiry-based learning #guided inquiry #project based inquiry

gameworkshop

Danish 5th graders plan their city in Minecraft

Today we tested our city planning game with a group of 5th graders from a local school. The game was a competition where groups of students played that they were architechtural firms, competing to win a task in the tender, given by the municipality. The piece of land the students were worked on, was an area where the municipalty wants to develop housing with 300 appartments.

The challenge given to the students was to show how they would create 20 appartments with an approximate size of 100m2. A deadline was given after lunchbreak, where the server had a visit from a “representative” from the municipality. This person was actually a student sitting next door chatting to the kids, asking them about their ideas.

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gileslie-blog

Failures = Learning

I had a set back in my inquiry yesterday that I am disappointed in. Even though the stars seemed to be aligning for the inquiry we were to embark on, there was a snag in the plan. It was the fault of no one but gives me great pause when even really good thoughtful inquiry minded educators, in a setting that requires and values ‘inquiry learning’ chose activity based small units over an extended inquiry with student choice, voice and creativity. These small units lend themselves to fact finding endeavors not deep reflective learning that I mean when I talk about inquiry. Inquiry in my mind is not finding facts to do a task. Inquiry is asking real and deep questions about a topic that I am interested in so that I may grow my learning and understanding and share it with others.

Is this a dead end for me… or do I go on and see what happens? Either way, I have learned a lot through this experience already- about systems, communication, and what it really takes, the habits of mind of a teacher, to embrace inquiry LEARNING and take the risk to let kids pave the way.

gileslie-blog

Starting with Open

In our unit with the 4/5th graders on Colorado history, we are going to begin with a trip to the CO History museum to get multiple perspectives on why people immigrated to Colorado. The students will be addressing the lines of inquiry from the IB curriculum:

How a society manages resources affects the world around them.

Lines of inquiry:

Relationship between land and people

Ripple effects of resource management

Rights and responsibilities of a society in managing finite resources

Key Concepts: Connection, Causation, Responsibility

The students will experience how and why different people chose to live in Colorado at various times through history. They will also see how the local American Indians used the natural resources to live in this place. So they will go to the museum with an eye on people and resources. The teacher hopes that this introduction will help them think about resources in new ways as well as get a feel for which group they would like to investigate in more depth. Each student will choose a group to explore the lines of inquiry and key concepts. We are hopeful that students will find a group they are passionate about and will enjoy investigating. We believe that if they dig deeply into one group, they will understand the concept and be able to transfer that understanding to other groups and people across time.