My Mission

Introduction

Hello, My name is Jake Crutchfield, and for the past year I have had the pleasure of being employed as a substitute teacher in the school district of Cambridge, Massachusetts. During this time I have personally viewed how special of a community Cambridge is, and how much this city values education. At each and every school I sub at I get a chance of seeing amazing students, faculty, and families that are all committed to improving the education of the Cambridge community.

Just a little more than a month ago I happened to stumble across the work of Sugata Mitra and his S.O.L.E. concept, and it inspired me more than anything in my life. To see everything thing that Mitra was doing, and where, I only assumed that this was happening in Cambridge as well.  But after spending some time asking around and doing research, I could not find the S.O.L.E. concept being used anywhere.

Big Questions

This all led to me asking myself some big questions. Why is this not happening here? Why can't something like this work in Cambridge? And what happens if the whole city of Cambridge takes a second to pause, and think about how we can make this happen here?

My Mission

I decided to make it my personal mission to do everything in my power to help this concept happen in Cambridge. To share the S.O.L.E. concept with the city of Cambridge, I’m pursuing this mission from three different angles.

The first way is by introducing the S.O.L.E. class to the community after-school program throughout the Cambridge schools. I am already on my way to make this happen at the Elm st and Amigos programs, but personally I believe there is no reason why this can’t be done at any after-school program in Cambridge.

The second way is attempting a new method of learning, which I like to call flash learning. Here is an example of my first attempt, which I handed out as a packet this past Halloween. Also here is a sample of my next project, a learning garden. Everyone enjoys watching a flash mob because they grab a whole crowd's attention. Why can’t this happen with learning?

The third way is I plan on asking five big questions a day via twitter. Each of these tweets will be personalized for what they do, who they are, and how they can help spread this concept. Each person will only receive one tweet. Each of these tweets will use Sugata Mitra as my citation, since without his work none of this would be possible.

My Goal

My goal is to help share this concept with as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, and as wide scale as possible. I am not saying that I have any of the answers, in fact I am a strong believer in the Mitra Pedagogy of "I don't know", but I have thought of a way to try and share this concept with a whole city.

This is my goal. My hopes are that after people become aware of both this concept and what I am trying to do that we can make it our goal. It is so simple for all of us to share these days. All it will take is a few simple re-tweets and then there is no reason that this concept can’t spread. There are plenty of videos of cats, flash mobs, and other things that go viral in no time at all. What happens if we make this concept go viral? How quickly will it spread? And how much can we help everyone improve then?

Thank you for taking your time to read this, and I look forward to sharing with you in the future,

Jake