Natural selection and learning: asking questions and being curious is adaptive behaviour.
inland pared the country’s elementary math curriculum from about 25 pages to four, reduced the school day by an hour, and focused on independence and active learning. By 2003, Finnish students had climbed from the lower rungs of international performance rankings to first place among developed nations.
emphasizing student-led learning and collaboration.
To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration.
eachers provide prompts
they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another.
“So,” Juárez Correa said, “what do you want to learn?”
“If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will self-organize around it,” Mitra says, “like bees around a flower.”
There will be no teachers, curriculum, or separation into age groups—just six or so computers and a woman to look after the kids’ safety. His defining principle: “The children are completely in charge.”
Theorists from Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi to Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori have argued that students should learn by playing and following their curiosity.
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin similarly claim that their Montessori schooling imbued them with a spirit of independence and creativity.
The study found that when the subjects controlled their own observations, they exhibited more coordination between the hippocampus and other parts of the brain involved in learning and posted a 23 percent improvement in their ability to remember objects.
if you’re not the one who’s controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well
Wikis also work well. Students can have separate folders where they can submit their work. Google docs would probably be best. The student shares their document with you. This eliminates email and both teacher and student have a copy of that document with all versions stored in its file history.