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John Seely Brown on Interest-Driven Learning, Mentors and the Importance of Play

in the past, it was likely to be very hard to find other people around you with your specialized interests. For example, when I was obsessed with building transmitters and radios as a kid, there were maybe five other kids in the entire state of New York who were also designing electronic equipment. I had no cohort group. Today, no matter how specialized a kid’s interest is, he or she will find a cohort group. When my godson was 9, he became fixated on penguins. He went on the internet, and he found himself a group or a collective that was deeply engaged with penguins. I said to him one day, “Well, who is this group?” And he said, “Well, they have a funny name.” And I said, “What’s that?” And he said, “Johns Hopkins!” He’d locked into a research group at Johns Hopkins! Yes, as a 9-year-old.

I personally feel that in order to get hooked on something—well, that’s the role of a great teacher, a great mentor. The role of the mentor is to get you to discover things you might not actually know you were interested in, to confront topics you may not be very good at understanding, but once discovered, you will.

we believe that freeing up some curricular time to pilot alternative pedagogical approaches that would be studied may yield more evidence on what works for whom without the worry that students will be shortchanged by less drilling on subject content.