
Adriana Santamaria P
Organisation: SOLE Colombia
Adriana is a communication designer, visual thinker and entrepreneur that believes in empowering people to take ideas into social actions. By approaching every opportunity as a design challenge she has structured roadmaps that integrate users,
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Amy-Leigh Hope
Organisation: George Stephenson High School
Amy-Leigh Hope is Curriculum Leader for Design Technology and Art at George Stephenson High School in Killingworth, Newcastle. Amy has been teaching for sixteen years,
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Amy-Leigh Hope

Aniket Mondal

Ashis Biswas

Brett Millott
Organisation: SOLE Australia Network
Brett is a primary school principal in Melbourne, Australia. With his colleague Paul Kenna, they have collaborated in SOLE action research in their schools since 2010,
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Christos Sotiropoulos
Organisation: Sotiropoulos English Language School
Christos has been teaching English since 1993 in a small village 30 km from Chania in Crete, Greece. He started with 30 students in a private school and now teaches English to about 100 students from K-3 to K-12.
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Clever International School
SOLE has recently been introduced at Clever International School and was received with great enthusiasm by teachers and pupils.
Children as young as 9 years old are being offered the opportunity to work as a team in search of knowledge,
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Dashgara Lab
Located in a rural Montessori middle school, Dasghara in West Bengal is about three hours from Kolkata. It is the the School in the Cloud’s smallest purpose-built research lab to date at just 15ft wide.
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Emma Crawley
Organisation: St. Aidan’s Church of England Primary School
Emma is a primary school teacher from the North East of England. She began using SOLE in the classroom as early as 2009 when she and Sugata Mitra first met.
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Felipe Spath
Organisation: SOLE Colombia
Felipe works in production and logistics with SOLE Colombia. He is an anthropologist with vast experience in the corporate world leading companies in the food sector in Colombia,
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Gloucester Road Primary School
Gloucester Road Primary School has embarked on a journey in developing 21st Century learning. The DEEP Curriculum focuses on REAL Projects allowing the development of SOLE to research our big questions.
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Happy Clover English Club
Happy Clover English Club is an after school program that focuses on creating an environment for children to learn and use English in a practical and applicable fashion.
The main target is building individual awareness and goals and how that awareness can be applied and integrated into network communities locally and on global scales by working and sharing with others towards common problems.
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Helen Moyer
Organisation: Willaston Primary School, Isle of Man
Helen has been using SOLE in her school on the Isle of Man to build on the Learning to Learn language that is embedded across the school.
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Hope Fuss
Organisation: Rockland Woods Elementary School
Hope’s interest in SOLE was sparked through her doctoral work when a professor showed Sugata Mitra’s TED talk as part of an assignment.
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James Stanfield

Jane Yates
Organisation: Armathwaite Community Primary School
I stumbled across the concept of a SOLE at Greenfields Community School in County Durham while I was running a Philosophy for Children(P4C) course for local teachers.
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Javier Bronchalo
Organisation: SOLE Spain
Javier Bronchalo is Project Coordinator at Knowledge Constructors and SOLE Spain. He is passionate about education with more than 18 years experience. He is enthusiastic about the idea of the learner as a social constructor of knowledge: the idea that learners achieve more through the active acquisition of information in groups,
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Jenn Casey
Organisation: SOLE for Georgia Homeschoolers
Jenn is a homeschooling mom of three kids, ages 8, 11 and 14. Their homeschooling approach has changed over the years, and they now consider themselves “unschoolers”
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Joe Jamison
Organisation: Pencils of Promise
Joe is the Pedagogy Innovation Specialist at Pencils of Promise, an innovative “for purpose” nonprofit organisation providing quality education in the developing world. He has over 16 years of experience in education,
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Joydev Goswami

Juan Pablo Calderón
Organisation: SOLE Colombia
Juan works with the SOLE Colombia community and technology. He is an educator, activist, hacker and maker. He is co-founder of Bogohack, a cutting-edge 3D printing open source hardware company.
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Kajal Gupta

Khud
Khud uses self-organised learning techniques pioneered by TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra to impact the lives of marginalised children in Pakistan. Our goal is to build an EdTech platform to overcome the challenge of teacher quality and availability (1.25 million teachers are needed in Pakistan).
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Lehla Eldridge
Organisation: www.unschoolingthekids.com
Lehla is a home educator who regularly made use of SOLE projects when her children were being homeschooled. They are now ‘unschooling’ and their lives are one big SOLE!
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Mabel Quiroga
Organisation: SOLE Argentina
Mabel is an English teacher and education specialist. She has worked with Dr. Mitra and his team in different minimally invasive education and SOLE projects for more than ten years.
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Madhura Rajvanshi

Mariano Lopata
Organisation: SOLE Argentina
Mariano is a psychologist and scientific research methodology specialist. He is also a university teacher and SOLE practitioner and researcher. As a founding member of SOLE Argentina he has participated,
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Martlesham Primary Academy
Martlesham Primary Academy are a collaborative learning school that believes in challenging the status quo every day. As Sugata Mitra postulated… ‘What is the future of learning?’ Martlesham believe that SOLE is the key to unlocking the 21st Century learning skills young individuals require today and therein the future.
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Milan Mandal

Natalia Arredondo

Natalia Arredondo
Organisation: SOLE NYC
Natalia Arredondo is currently undertaking her PhD studies in SOLE. While collecting data for her project, Natalia opened the first SOLE laboratory in America. She is currently the coordinator of SOLE NYC in Harlem,
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Nic Arb
Nic loves technology, computing, Android, electronic mapping, and GPS. She is a member of the Granny Cloud network.
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Oscar O'Farrill
Organisation: SOLE México
Oscar is a psychologist who has been experimenting with SOLE since 2013. Initially based in a community centre in Tres Marías, Morelos, SOLE has also been implemented by Oscar in different scenarios such as public and private schools for elementary and secondary students,
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Paradise School Goa
Paradise School is about giving children the skills for 21st century living, and its director maps the curriculum to the IGCSE curriculum (they will also be aiming for International Cambridge Board accreditation).
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Paul Kenna
Organisation: SOLE Australia Network
Paul is the Principal of Belle Vue Park Primary School in Melbourne, Australia. With his colleague Brett Millot, he has collaborated in SOLE action research in his school since 2010,
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Poonam Thakur
Organisation: SOLE Dallas Montessori Education
Poonam is a certified Montessori teacher and experimenting with homeschooling approach over the years.
Poonam believes that the advantages of the SOLE process for the kids as self-learning and work collaboratively in groups,
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Project Hello World
Project Hello World, created by non-profit organisation Projects For All, is based on the belief that vulnerable communities across the world deserve connectivity, access to information and opportunities to learn.
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Rick Pasin
Organisation: My Education Room
Having spent over eighteen years as an instructor, department head and director of operations and academics in post-secondary institutions Rick saw first-hand the powerful influence of self-organized/flipped classroom learning environments.
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Ritu Sehji
Organisation: Westlake Boys High School
Ritu is currently the Head of Food Technology at Westlake Boys High School. She is an author, a recipient of the Endeavour Teacher Fellowship award managed by Royal Society of New Zealand and has recently finished study at The MindLab following a Next Generation scholarship she received in 2015.
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Rondeen McLean
Organisation: The Literary Genius Foundation
Over the course of her thirteen-year career in the United States, Rondeen McLean never forgot her roots in Jamaica and often thought of returning.
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Salahuddin Khawaja
Organisation: Khud
Salah spent 15+ years in the financial sector in New York, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Initially 11+ years as a management consultant with Deloitte. He then moved to J.P.
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Sanjay Fernandes
Organisation: SOLE Colombia
Sanjay is the Director of SOLE Colombia. He is an economist, interaction designer, educator and electronic musician. He majored in economics with a minor in arts at the Andes University to later become an art professor in the Education Master’s program of the same university.
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Sarah Leonard
Sarah is an experienced teacher who has been successfully using the SOLE approach across the 7-11 age range. Sarah has taught in a variety of settings from inner city London to a town primary school.
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Sebastián Cuervo
Organisation: SOLE Colombia
Sebastián describes himself as an Internet Sociotechnologist. He is an Earlham College Human Development and Social Relations scholar, currently working as a digital culture and community maker consultant.
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Shurashree Das

SOLE Argentina
SOLE Argentina aims to promote the SOLE methodology so that it becomes a well-known pedagogical theory which is shared, implemented and experienced by Argentine teachers on a regular basis. We aim to promote and advance 21st Century skills amongst primary and secondary students and teachers and enable them to fully participate and succeed in an interconnected global society.
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SOLE Australia Network
SOLE Australia Network is a group of schools who are interested in developing SOLE as a mainstream classroom teaching strategy. The SOLE Australia Network is led by Paul Kenna, Principal of Belle Vue Park Primary School and Brett Millott,
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SOLE Central
SOLE Central is the home of the School in the Cloud. It is a global hub for research into self-organised learning environments (SOLEs), bringing together researchers, practitioners,
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SOLE Cleveland
SOLE Cleveland (SOLE CLE) are an academic group with a focus on scaling SOLEs across the Cleveland, Ohio area.
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SOLE Colombia
SOLE Colombia believes that when collaborating in groups, anybody can learn anything. Within groups, people can work to solve their own challenges and transform their community through self-organisation. SOLE Colombia has reached 14 provinces in Colombia,
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SOLE for Georgia Homeschoolers
SOLE for Georgia Homeschoolers is currently running SOLEs at Learning for Life homeschool co-op located in Kennesaw, Georgia (a suburb of Atlanta). Previously, they were offering SOLE classes at The Learning Village (formerly known as Georgia Enrichment Program for Homeschoolers).
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SOLE Greece
SOLE Greece was established in response to the needs of refugee children stranded in Greece. Over 20,000 children and their families are seeking refuge in Europe and elsewhere after been displaced as a result of conflicts in the Middle East.
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SOLE Jamaica
SOLE Jamaica, a project run by the Kingston, Jamaica-based Literary Genius Foundation, is creating better early childhood education programs in Jamaica’s underserved communities. We aim to help young learners develop the foundational skills needed for a lifelong love of learning.
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SOLE Mexico
SOLE México is a community focused on promoting SOLE with Mexican teachers, schools and education enthusiasts. Our goal is to expand the notion of Self Organised Learning Environments and Minimally Invasive Education through a nonprofit organisation and a social startup in order to have a social-economic approach to education in our country.
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SOLE NYC
John B. Russwurm P.S. 197M is the proud host of the first SOLE lab in America. Located in Harlem, New York City, we inspire students to ask and solve Big Questions while teaching each other the intricate paths of knowledge.
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SOLE South Africa
SOLE South Africa, through their flagship program SOLE in a BOX, commits to taking learning innovation to rural and underserved schools across South Africa- One Big Question at a Time.
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SOLE Spain
SOLE Spain’s goal is to bring the country’s teacher-training universities and schools together, to empower students to take control of their own learning. In an effort to scale the SOLE methodology across Spain in the next 5 years,
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SOLE UK
SOLE UK is a forum for teachers across the UK to post the different SOLE questions they have asked their classes and to share their findings. This is a great place to celebrate all things SOLE and to encourage other schools to have a go at using Professor Mitra’s inspirational SOLE approach.
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SOLE-Japan
SOLE-Japan started in Kani, Japan in 2016. It’s a privately run school currently operating on weekends when students have time to come. We run junior high school and high school sessions at our location in Kani City.
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Sophie Lewis
Organisation: Greenfield Arts
I have been the Arts and Community Centre Coordinator for Greenfield Arts for one year now and in that time I have seen a vast selection of SOLE sessions,
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Sophie Lewis

Sugata Mitra
Sugata Mitra is Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University.
His “Hole in the Wall” experiments, begun in 1999, revealed that groups of children can learn almost anything by themselves given Internet access and the ability to work collaboratively.
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Suneeta Kulkarni

TED Lab - George Stephenson High School
The world’s first School in the Cloud opened its doors at George Stephenson High School.
Students designed the interior of this one-room learning lab – which has colourful beanbags scattered throughout and fluffy clouds painted on the walls.
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TED Lab - Gocharan
The project’s flagship lab is located in the village of Narayanitala, Gocharan and opened in early 2015.
Many of the insights already gained while setting up School in the Cloud labs in the other locations have been worked into the construction at Gocharan.
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TED Lab - Greenfield Arts (Room 13)
Greenfield Arts is the site of the ‘Room 13’ SOLE Lab. Designed to be very different to a normal classroom, Room 13 has an ‘outdoor feel’ – including artificial grass –
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TED Lab - Kalkaji
Kalkaji is located in the capital, New Delhi, in a girls’ school close to the site of Sugata’s original Hole in the Wall experiment.
The school only runs in the morning as the premises are shared with the boys who attend school in the afternoon.
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TED Lab - Korakati
Our remotest lab in every sense of the word, Korakati is located in the village of Sandeshkhali, 125km from Kolkata (Calcutta).
Setting aside issues of connectivity in such a rural location,
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TED Lab - Phaltan
Located in the small, historic town of Phaltan, this lab is approximately 115 km from Pune in the Satara District of Maharashtra in Western India.
It is housed in a site where the Granny Cloud has already been used by the middle school for a year.
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Tempo Foundation
Tempo Foundation aims at inspiring, encouraging and developing innovations in Bulgarian education. Implementing SOLE in Bulgarian schools is an excellent example of how innovative educational methods can work even in public school system in Bulgaria.
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Yolanda Vergara Sarmiento
Yolanda is a technology teacher at San Jose de Monterrico School. She discovered her vocation for teaching as a student, when she was teaching technology classes at a primary school.
Read moreCommunity Map
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Join Our Community

There are many ways to get involved with School in the Cloud, from running your own SOLE to becoming a Granny or carrying out research with us.
Download Toolkit

A useful guide to how to run your own SOLE. Our toolkit is free to use and adapt to your own environment through Creative Commons licence.
Read Our Story

School in the Cloud is learning at the edge of chaos; a place to come together to discover and explore self-organised learning (SOLE).
Big Questions

A great Big Question will get your SOLE off to a flying start, but deciding what to ask is the hardest part! Children love questions with no easy answer.
TED Lab - Phaltan
SOLE: Technology that’s powered by people
If I was to go back to school anytime soon, I’d want Arun Chavan as my teacher: he’s intelligent, articulate, inspiring and best of all, not afraid to rock the boat a little.
Now in his third year of a PhD in Evolutionary Biology at Yale, USA, Arun may have come a long way from his home village of Shirgaon, India but he hasn’t forgotten his roots.
It was there that Arun first encountered the Internet as a 12-year-old, placed in a hole in a wall by Professor Sugata Mitra as part of his early experiments into self organized learning.
If I was to go back to school anytime soon, I’d want Arun Chavan as my teacher: he’s intelligent, articulate, inspiring and best of all, not afraid to rock the boat a little.
Now in his third year of a PhD in Evolutionary Biology at Yale, USA, Arun may have come a long way from his home village of Shirgaon, India but he hasn’t forgotten his roots.
It was there that Arun first encountered the Internet as a 12-year-old, placed in a hole in a wall by Professor Sugata Mitra as part of his early experiments into self organized learning.
Now Arun is taking part in Skype sessions at the School in the Cloud lab at Phaltan, Maharashtra, just an hour from where his parents grew up. Having known School in the Cloud’s research director Dr Suneeta Kulkarni since he was a child, Arun didn’t take much persuading to give something back to the project.
His first session – switching often between his native language Marathi and English – was with a small group talking about all the different birds and trees found around the school.
“The Hole in the Wall seems a very long time ago now,” Arun admits. “I do remember surfing the net and searching for things and that it was all in English – a language I barely understood at the time. I used to copy it down and go back to ask my father what it meant.”
Arun, unlike many of his peers, was in a privileged position as he had educated adults around him who helped to foster his love of learning.
“I was very fortunate that my father was involved in so many things outside of my own village,” he explains.
Read moreSOLE: A Parent's View
Something’s changed in our house recently… internet use by my children is fractionally less gaming and on-demand tv and more educational. There’s been an internet revelation and I think that’s down to SOLE being used at my children’s school.
Unlike my generation, today our children are surrounded by constant online connectivity and like many parents I worry about the detrimental effects of continual access to the internet. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an internet luddite, in fact I love the internet, but I do worry that my children aren’t using it effectively. One barrier is that from an early age we,
Something’s changed in our house recently… internet use by my children is fractionally less gaming and on-demand tv and more educational. There’s been an internet revelation and I think that’s down to SOLE being used at my children’s school.
Unlike my generation, today our children are surrounded by constant online connectivity and like many parents I worry about the detrimental effects of continual access to the internet. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an internet luddite, in fact I love the internet, but I do worry that my children aren’t using it effectively. One barrier is that from an early age we, rightly so, teach our children about the potential dangers of the internet but we don’t necessarily teach them how amazing the internet can be when used safely. My husband and I are great at modelling how to use the internet for managing the mundane aspects of our lives – banking, utility bills, grocery shopping – hardly inspiring stuff, so it’s no wonder that all our boys used the internet for was gaming and tv where they are “safe”. But recently there has been a slight shift towards a more enriching use.
My 10 year old son, Arthur, has a fascination with the natural world, in particular Space, which he shares with his grandfather. There is a constant email stream between the two of them and to my delight Arthur can now be regularly found searching through the NASA and ESA websites looking for answers to questions posed by his grandad, relishing when he teaches his grandad something new. For me it has also been lovely watching their relationship grow (and who’d have thought that the internet could facilitate that?) SOLE talks about its Cloud Grannies but don’t dismiss all the Cloud Grandads out there.
Read moreSOLE Mexico
SOLE = Socratic Method 2.0
Since the last time I spoke to SOLE México’s co-ordinator Oscar O’Farrill several years ago a lot has happened.
To be honest, I’d be surprised if great things hadn’t been achieved in the interim as it was obvious from Oscar’s passion and drive in the previous blog, that SOLE México was destined to make big waves in education.
For one, they’ve trained over 160 teachers. “It’s been exploding like crazy – it’s been amazing,” says Oscar. “There are now 11 people in the team where before it was only me! We’re now working in several states in Mexico and I’ve been able to see how SOLE works in public schools,
Since the last time I spoke to SOLE México’s co-ordinator Oscar O’Farrill several years ago a lot has happened.
To be honest, I’d be surprised if great things hadn’t been achieved in the interim as it was obvious from Oscar’s passion and drive in the previous blog, that SOLE México was destined to make big waves in education.
For one, they’ve trained over 160 teachers. “It’s been exploding like crazy – it’s been amazing,” says Oscar. “There are now 11 people in the team where before it was only me! We’re now working in several states in Mexico and I’ve been able to see how SOLE works in public schools, elementary, high schools, teacher training – all over.”
SOLE México secured a state contract for training 100 teachers from extreme rural communities (including the middle of a jungle) and are now carrying out a follow-up programme where they visit each of the schools to help the teachers make SOLE an ongoing process.
Oscar says the importance of a follow-up to teacher training shouldn’t be under-estimated. “SOLE in theory is great, but to take it over a school cycle where many teachers want it focussed on their curriculum and expect regular evaluation, you have to design it around great Big Questions,” he explains.
“We’ve found that one session each week is not enough,” adds Oscar. “To me, SOLE is like Socratic Method 2.0 – basically going to the roots of the knowledge, sharing it and looking for it. Before they had only themselves and the teacher but now we have thousands of years of knowledge easily accessible through the Internet.”
From his experience, it can take several months to fully integrate SOLE as both students and teachers get used to a new way of learning.
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The Big Question
View All Questions
Food chemistry - Posted by Snigdha
What is the chemistry behind delicious food? What knowledge of chemistry can chefs use to improve the taste of food?
What is the chemistry behind delicious food? What knowledge of chemistry can chefs use to improve the taste of food?
Read moreInspiring families to learn together
Like many before him, Steven Delpome was inspired to try SOLE after hearing Sugata Mitra talk.
“I was listening to him on the TED Radio Hour and got fascinated by the whole idea,” he explains. Up until then I was a believer like everyone else that you tell children to do things, they practice, learn it and move on. Then the test says ‘they passed’ so they’re good.”
At that point in our chat, Steven pauses to reflect on what he just said: “I’ve moved on so far since then –
Like many before him, Steven Delpome was inspired to try SOLE after hearing Sugata Mitra talk.
“I was listening to him on the TED Radio Hour and got fascinated by the whole idea,” he explains. Up until then I was a believer like everyone else that you tell children to do things, they practice, learn it and move on. Then the test says ‘they passed’ so they’re good.”
At that point in our chat, Steven pauses to reflect on what he just said: “I’ve moved on so far since then – that sentence makes so little sense to me right now!” he laughs.
Later that year he started experimenting a little in class to see what the kids could do on their own. He didn’t rush into it though – he spent seven months researching SOLE before he took the leap. “I thought ‘let’s try it once and see how it goes’,” he says. So the 6th grade English teacher picked a question off the list of Big Questions – What is irony?
“I followed the pattern word for word and it was fairly brilliant,” Steven explains. He ran the SOLE on the Friday of a long weekend and on the following Tuesday, he pulled the kids aside for 1:1s to see what they remembered. The concept had stuck for almost all of them.
“What impressed me was that they didn’t all have the same answer – they were able to build their own understanding around it,” he says. For example, one girl had found a video online that showed the difference between surprise and irony which made it clear to her.
SOLE Colombia
SOLE gives peace a chance
When Sugata Mitra first muted the idea of the School in the Cloud, his dream was a place where children could go on intellectual adventures together.
But in Colombia, it’s not just children that are doing it – whole communities are embracing self organised learning environments (SOLE) to help them find answers to their own Big Questions.
As SOLE Colombia’s director, Sanjay Fernandes, explains, his organisation’s work to expand SOLE across the country has led to amazing outcomes they never envisaged three years ago. It’s also put them in an unique position to help advise on the peace process,
When Sugata Mitra first muted the idea of the School in the Cloud, his dream was a place where children could go on intellectual adventures together.
But in Colombia, it’s not just children that are doing it – whole communities are embracing self organised learning environments (SOLE) to help them find answers to their own Big Questions.
As SOLE Colombia’s director, Sanjay Fernandes, explains, his organisation’s work to expand SOLE across the country has led to amazing outcomes they never envisaged three years ago. It’s also put them in an unique position to help advise on the peace process, which we’ll get to shortly!
“People in rural communities have their own Big Questions and that’s what has been so powerful,” says Sanjay. “It’s been fascinating to see and very different to your average education stories. It’s not about grade results or organisational objectives – it’s about community empowerment and that’s what we’re all about.”
Villagers have used SOLE to find out how to make their plantations more efficient and productive and also used what they’ve discovered to set up their own entrepreneurial projects such as creating bakeries or making recycled bags. (SOLE Colombia’s own SOLE kit is made out of old grain/rice/ or flour sacks and has inspired many others to try it themselves).
In one rural village, about one and a half hours away from the nearest town, people go to do a SOLE in the school at least once a week, without any guidance. “They’re completely doing it on their own – we don’t control that,” says Sanjay. “This is real self organisation where we don’t need to do anything at all.”
And now SOLE Colombia has just embarked on its most ambitious project yet –
Read moreHow to make SOLE more social
Helen Moyer hates the word “teacher” despite the fact she’s been one for seven years.
“I remember teachers from my own school days standing in front of the class just relaying facts and I never wanted to do that,” she says. “I want to create an atmosphere where the children see me as a learner as well and SOLE is perfect for that. It’s completely changed the way I teach.”
Williston School, where Helen works, is also a supporter of P4C (Philosophy for Children), which she finds aligns well with SOLE principles. For the past few years they have been working towards letting the children own their learning,
Helen Moyer hates the word “teacher” despite the fact she’s been one for seven years.
“I remember teachers from my own school days standing in front of the class just relaying facts and I never wanted to do that,” she says. “I want to create an atmosphere where the children see me as a learner as well and SOLE is perfect for that. It’s completely changed the way I teach.”
Williston School, where Helen works, is also a supporter of P4C (Philosophy for Children), which she finds aligns well with SOLE principles. For the past few years they have been working towards letting the children own their learning, embracing new technologies and pedagogical approaches.
Being on the Isle of Man (which is located in the Irish Sea between Great Britain and Ireland – pictured below) means educators enjoy more freedom to experiment than most: they have their own government, no OFSTED inspections, and can create their own curriculum.
“We’re pushing boundaries all the time and the difference SOLE has made has been incredible,” says Helen. “It’s created a level of curiosity and an ability to share their learning collaboratively which is nothing short of amazing. It’s like the love of learning has been re-ignited within them.”
Helen was first introduced to SOLE three years ago when one of the IT staff returned from a conference where Sugata Mitra was speaking and suggested they try it out.
But the first few attempts weren’t exactly a success. “It was complete chaos and I thought ‘what on earth am I doing?!’” says Helen.
One of her challenges was the amount of high level needs pupils she had in her class, with dyslexia and autism especially prevalent among the students.
Read moreLong distance friendship is the perfect medicine
Most trainee doctors are driven by a desire to help others, but for Shahrukh Khan, his motivation is also deeply personal.
He was just six-years-old when his father died of a heart attack in India. Many years later, when he had only just begun his degree studies in the Philippines, he lost his mother in the same way. It was at this point that Shahrukh decided to become a surgeon or cardiologist.
It has been a long and complicated road to reach the point he is at today – just two years away from becoming a qualified doctor.
Most trainee doctors are driven by a desire to help others, but for Shahrukh Khan, his motivation is also deeply personal.
He was just six-years-old when his father died of a heart attack in India. Many years later, when he had only just begun his degree studies in the Philippines, he lost his mother in the same way. It was at this point that Shahrukh decided to become a surgeon or cardiologist.
It has been a long and complicated road to reach the point he is at today – just two years away from becoming a qualified doctor. When he was just 13-years-old, he met someone who, although neither of them knew it at the time, would change his life. That person was retired teacher Liz Fewings, who was Skyping in from her home in London, UK to his school’s new computer lab in Hyderabad, India.
Eight years on, she can still recall their first meeting. “The Granny Cloud session had been arranged through Suneeta (Kulkarni) and I was expecting a group of kindergarten children,” she explains. “I had prepared to read Jasper’s Beanstalk and had my trowel and seeds and everything ready when suddenly in walks a group of teenagers! Suneeta was laughing like a drain but I went ahead with it anyway – they seemed quite happy!”
Shahrukh was put in charge of organising his 9th grade group, which didn’t really take off, but he and Liz continued to talk to each other. He made the most of any opportunity to be part of this early self organised learning environment (SOLE) to improve his English and general knowledge skills.
Shahrukh in the Philippines today
When he was looking to study for a degree,
Read moreSOLE Central
A philosophical approach to SOLE
For our latest blog post, we spoke to Sugata Mitra about his current experiment, which is bound to get people thinking! You can also listen to the interview in full.
Sugata: “When I think about children and values and beliefs I find most of the time these are actually impose – unlike, for example, a poem. You wouldn’t say to a child ‘you have to like this poem because it’s very famous’. You would say ‘do you think it’s a good poem?’
“In the English language we would say values are acquired.
For our latest blog post, we spoke to Sugata Mitra about his current experiment, which is bound to get people thinking! You can also listen to the interview in full.
Sugata: “When I think about children and values and beliefs I find most of the time these are actually impose – unlike, for example, a poem. You wouldn’t say to a child ‘you have to like this poem because it’s very famous’. You would say ‘do you think it’s a good poem?’
“In the English language we would say values are acquired. But I don’t see any acquisition going on here <in mainstream education>. I see imposition instead.
“When it comes to belief systems it can get even worse. A lot of our world’s troubles are because of belief systems. <But> if a belief system is editable then I think there’s not much wrong with it.
“In a way science is a belief system: people tell you there’s gravity and you might say ‘how do you know?’ and I would say: ‘here’s the experiments that show that gravity exists’, but then you are not going to do those experiments. You really have to just believe me, so it is a belief system but it is editable.
Children-led belief and value systems
“As time goes on our beliefs change and we say ‘they got it wrong and now we’ve got it right’. However, unfortunately there are other belief systems which our children grow up in which are not editable. They are usually written down 1,000s of years ago and they are in every culture. I’m a bit uneasy with books written several thousand years ago which are not editable and everything in them is supposed to be right.
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