Four walls decorated with maps and photos of historical figures, stiff wooden desks and chairs, chalk and chalkboards, raising your hand while an adult reads to you from a textbook. Such are the essential qualities of any successful learning environment, yes?
According to self-taught computer scientist Gever Tulley – not on your trusty three-ringed binder. Not even on your PowerPoint slides.
To Tulley, the best learning takes place through experiences; being thrust into an unknown situation and working with others to find a solution. Or maybe not finding a solution, there’s no difference. Keep your gold star stickers or garish red marker for arts and crafts – his motto is “Create a meaningful experience and the learning will follow.”
“Maybe education isn’t something that you do to people. We can start from the idea that inside every one of us is a voracious self-directed learner,” Tulley said at the 2009 Big Ideas Fest, a three-day series of lectures about educational innovations. He was talking about Tinkering School, a week-long camp-that-thinks-it’s-a-school Tulley founded to teach kids 8-17 years old, well, how to build things. Working with raw materials, real power tools, and only crudely drawn images to use as building instructions (in other words, the IKEA catalogue!), students are encouraged to experiment, create, and even fail to complete the project.
You know that warm fuzzy feeling you get when you finally solve that puzzle you’ve been working on? Or the jolt when you learn a fact you never expected to be true? Well it turns out it’s all part of the brain. Special pleasure-producing hormones are released when we learn and when we are surprised. Tulley’s school is based on the fact that we really like it when learning surprises us. Thus, at Tinkering School, students literally take their learning into their own hands and tackle their projects without really knowing what the final product will be.
Tinkering School is all about engaging the student, which for Tulley also means treating them as competent individuals and reflecting real-life situations. Thus, the kids cut their own wood and operate real, heavy duty power tools. He has expanded this idea through a new book called “Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do).” This might not sound like a parent’s ideal learning environment for their children, but Tulley insists that when you treat youths like adults, they’ll respond in that way. As he says in his lecture, there has never been an injury at Tinkering School that required more than a Band-Aid.
In Canada, young kids are spending more and more time in front of a computer screen or a TV set. Hobbies are virtually inexistent beyond checking email. With Tulley’s theory in mind, it might be useful for Canadian parents to realize that as long as there is an engaging environment, learning can occur anywhere and not only within the four walls of a classroom.
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