Let Students Do the Learning
A story of how Turing Society started
In 2035, a girl born today will turn 18. About 80% of jobs at that time still do not exist today. What is the future we are preparing for this girl? Is our education system future-proof? Can we really educate our students on something, we do not understand ourselves? I think we can.
Current Education System
Today, I am convinced that the core of education is not what we are teaching to our students. The main question is how. The current education system is mostly a one-way stream of information. Teachers commonly teach a class with little or no active involvement of the students. They are taught to stay silent in class, raise their hand for a question and don’t talk to each other during tests. Not only that, education standardises students, as they must learn by the same curriculum, based on same disciplines and at the same pace. We all know it and have been through it — by the age of 19, the school has taken ⅔ of a teenagers life. But don’t take me wrong — I loved school and learned so much studying in there. It is undoubtedly a crucial part of every teenagers life, forming his/hers views on the world. However sadly, very few of us did enjoy the studying part of these years, or more the way we studied. Regardless, I believe that we all have at least some great memories from the school years.
When I think back of my school years, I remember one teacher I had, who taught me psychology. He was young, knowledgeable and innovative in his teaching. We would go on trips together with him — Slovakia, UK, Spain. During one of those trips, we participated in a Youth Exchange project in Slovakia. There, I got to meet people from all around the world. Some people would come from poor countries, some would be lone hitchhikers or active travelers, while we were the youngest group. Regardless of our differences, we were able to connect. Every evening we would discuss ideas, share ideas, debate ideas. We would frequently just talk, discuss, and ask questions. I have learned so much about everyone’s cultures, languages and countries. This made me start thinking — why could I not have the same way of learning back at my highschool? At that moment, it struck me — this is what a true education is. A true education must come from a community, it must be a two-way stream of ideas, shared in a dialog. In our society we base everything on dialogs and human contact. Interestingly, we are not doing this too much at our educational institutions.
This thought had stayed at me for a while. While studying at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, I, together with my friend and soon-to-be co-founder Teodor, discussed the future of education and how we would like to study Computer Science ourselves. We believed we could create a community, in which people learn from each other. This is how Turing Society started.
Three principles to create a future-proof education
In Turing Society, we work with technology education. As a non-profit, we run affordable coding workshops, courses and build communities around them. Through our work in this field we have found one key element: it is best to let students do the learning themselves. It is naive to say we can prepare our students for their future. Instead, we say we are preparing them to be able to successfully adapt to whatever the future might be. Which makes our students future-proof. In our path to achieve this, we have developed three main principals: independent studying, peer-to-peer learning and community.
1. Independent studying
We found our first principle, when during our coding courses we, as instructors, stopped giving out solutions to our students. We let them to figure out the right solutions themselves. We call it a 20-minute rule. It works very simple. If you are facing a problem, you must try to solve it by yourself for at least 20 minutes. If you cannot come up with an answer during that time, you have to ask a fellow student and both of you try to solve it together for another 20 minutes. That is using any resources you have — you can google, read a book or call your mom, if she is a coder, — whatever works for you. However, if that does not work, and after the total of 40 minutes you did not solve the problem you were having, you should approach an instructor. Only then, the instructor will give you a hint and guide you the right way, but never give-out a full solution. This 20-minute rule re-creates a real-life situation. When our student is working at a company, she has a habit of solving things by herself. She is not rushing to a colleague every 5 minutes asking questions, and ultimately wasting their time. The results of our 20 minute rule are remarkable — students of Turing Society bootcamps are independent, and they are trying harder to understand the problem that they are facing. Doing so, they have also improved connections with their fellow students.
2. Peer-to-peer learning
And this connection is really the core of our 2nd principle — peer-to-peer learning. During our courses, we have found that students actually like learning from each other. We would see them forming groups, meeting in the library or local cafe to work on coding problems together. I remember once walking into the local cafe and seeing a group of people surrounded by laptops, actively doing something. As I walked closer, I realised they were from Turing Society — working together on their assignments. To take this a step further, during one of our courses, we took a step further and completely removed the instructor. There was no one to teach our students. We only had Teaching Assistants to give our students the topics & support them during their assignments. And, very importantly, these Teaching Assistants were part of our community — they were graduates of our previous courses. Even with this setting, students really learned the course. We saw an increase in their connectiveness to the community. At the end of the day, our students always know there is someone to help them in the community and are willing to help others as well. This is only possible because of the strong community that we formed.
3. Community
This is why our third, and the most important principle is the community. It is at the core of everything we do. Students who meet in our courses, very often keep later working together: they solve coding assignments, start a side-projects, build businesses. By putting our community at the top of our priority list, we make everyone feel welcomed. As an example, we, at our courses have never had a gender gap. About 45% of our students are women, while the market-standard is only at about 17%. We had never even ran a separate promotion for women to get into coding! Most of our students first participate in our community, have a chat or a drink with one of the Turing Society members, and only then joins a course or a workshop, not other way around. We believe that our strong community is the reason why everyone feels welcomed, regardless of their age, race or gender.
Future of education is a future-proof education
In brief, the three Turing Society learning principles: independent studying, peer-to-peer learning and a community — sounds pretty simple? How do these three actually come together? Remember, I mentioned creating a future-proof education? Three core skills that we focus on educate a student that is fully capable of learning idependently. Students become accustomed to not understanding some concepts and instead of panicking, know what to do to fix it. We do not focus on hard-skills so much, our main goal is to have students be as independent as possible. At our courses, we don’t care if our student graduates not knowing how to code the latest technology app. The only thing we care about is that he/she understands where to start a project and is completely self-sufficient in learning the skills he/she needs to complete it. Learning is a life-long process. These are the skills we need to build, that should be the backbone of a future-proof education. Education system which prepares our students for whatever the future might come.
Where did we get this inspiration from, you might ask? Believe it or not, it was almost exactly two years ago, at the time of this writing, in a place called Cafe Booon in Rotterdam. October 26th, 2015, I first met Teodor, when he told a story about Duolingo — online platform to learn languages. When Bill Gates was giving an interview, as someone asked him what he likes to do during his free time, Gates said that he likes to use Duolingo to learn French & Chinese. The richest man alive, with net worth close to $90B, did not go and hire someone as a tutor, he chose to independently study via a free website online. At the same time, there are schools in Guatemala that use Duolingo as a platform to break english barriers of the poor by teaching it in classes. Now note that the world’s richest man alive and the very poor kids in distant villages of Guatemala use the same platform to independently learn languages. They all have equal opportunities and equal amount of resources on-app to make the best of the world-class education. Isn’t this great? This is exactly why we should question the expected in our current education. Why we should question our education.
After-all
In 2035, a girl born today will turn 18. About 80% of jobs at that time still do not exist today. What is the future we are preparing for this girl? Is our education system future-proof? Can we really educate our students on something, we do not understand ourselves?
I think we can.
Turing Society is a social enterprise, focused to make world class tech education available to all. At the moment of writing we are creating a complete tech education ecosystem in Lithuania, The Netherlands and México.
Myself, I am a Co-Founder & Chairman of Turing Society. My work in education has led me to create a community around tech, start working as a Computer-Science teacher in high-school I studied at and tirelessly push for critical change in the way we teach Computer Science.
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