By Kevin Meyer
I came across this TED video a couple days ago and have been trying to wrap my head around the implications… and opportunities… ever since. It's an intriguing insight into learning, and the power of self-directed learning. In effect the kids already knew how to learn, then learned how to teach, then learned what they needed to know… all without external intervention. How could that improve education and even homeschooling? And how can that instinctual behavior be leveraged into an organizational or business environment? I'm still thinking and may come up with some insight that I'll write about later. But I thought I'd share the video for you to noodle on over the weekend.
Ron Pereira says
Kevin, thanks for sharing this. As a lean thinker and homeschooling family I definitely relate to this style of instruction.
We use a Classical Liberal Arts curriculum to teach our kids. A lot of it is done online.
The other day, my 6 year old daughter was watching her lesson… she was learning her Latin numbers. My 4 year old son was bored so he sat down and watched the lesson with her.
After the lesson my wife went through a series of questions with my daughter. One was to simply count to 10 in Latin. My daughter got to 6 and stumbled on 7.
Without prompting, my 4 year old son finished the numbers for her after watching the video one time! Apparently he now knows how to count to 10 in Latin!
And for the record, my daughter can as well… she also knows what a Diphthong is… she had to teach her Dad as I had no clue! I guess I should watch some lessons with them. ;-)
Dave says
Thanks for sufficiently blowing my mind! Now, how to use this for Kaizen…
Jim Fernandez says
Wow. That’s very interesting.
This makes me think that I (we) might be over managing Lean improvement efforts. Maybe the best approach would be to simply throw a problem at a work group and go away and let them figure out the solution. Make it some sort of self discovery Kaizen event. All I need to do is figure out how to motivate the workers.
What I’m doing now is coaching, teaching, prodding, pushing, pleading, etc. I feel like I’m always trying to squeeze ideas out of rocks. I suppose adults have built up a lot of walls over the years that block their natural inquisitive and curious nature.