They'd just play Xbox wouldn't they?

On a previous post, I wrote about the apparent lack of student engagement. 

From my own experience in the Early Years, I have always felt that by allowing the children to choose their context, you enable everyone's (adult's and child's) time and energy to be spent actually learning - rather than fighting each other. 

As such, to me, a child-led project based approach has always seemed the best way to achieve higher levels of student engagement throughout school. However, one of the things that I believe holds this approach back is that we have a real trust issue with our children. 

This was demonstrated during an interview that Joe Harrison of Slow Education, and Andy Raymer from the fantastic Matthew Moss High school (MMHS) did on BBC Breakfast. 

At MMHS, they have developed 'My World', a project based learning section to their curriculum. They believe in the children being in the centre of the process, choosing what and how they learn. 

It's a belief that's seen great results with definite improvements in the children's dispositions towards learning. But like the journalist in the video below, for the most part society doesn't trust our children to want to learn. 

The answer to the "Won't they just play on Xbox?" question being a montage of the students' ideas of what they would choose to learn, is perfect and should reassure any doubters.

Slow School Vox Pop NOVEMBER 16th from Nikki O'Rourke on Vimeo.

And on a whole other level of what children can achieve on their own, there's the brilliant and charming, Sugata Mitra. His TED talk is amazing and underlines, in red many times, how much we underestimate children. I'm beginning to think that school actually just holds children back...