Education Bookcast

Discovery learning is an approach that I was trying out at around the time I was in the 20's of episode numbers of this podcast. I tried out the idea of Maths Circles, running a few of my own and attending a course about them in Notre Dame University in the United States. I also tried running a Self-Organised Learning Environment or SOLE, modelled on the work of Sugata Mitra, famous for his "hole-in-the-wall" experiments in India. Since then, I have discovered the reasons why these sorts of approaches don't work, and I've been discussing this recently on the podcast. I also discussed the Sugata Mitra's apparent dishonesty in the episode on Hope in the Wall. In this episode, we look at the history of the idea of discovery learning. First suggested in the 1960's by Jerome Bruner, it has since gone through several rounds of re-branding and repeated research. The article in question is called Should There Be a Three Strikes Rule Against Discovery Learning? The Case for Guided Methods of Instruction by Richard May