Failure to Disrupt Book Club with Natalie Rusk and Mitch Resnick

For TeachLab’s fourth Failure to Disrupt Book Club episode, we look back at Justin’s live conversation with Natalie Rusk and Mitch Resnick from MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten Lab and who are the developers of the Computer Clubhouse program and the Scratch programming language. They discuss the founding of these programs as well as Failure To Disrupt’s Chapter 3: Peer-Guided Learning at Scale: Networked Learning Environments.

“I think sometimes there really is this misperception about this type of creative learning approach... it's growing out of, as you say in the chapter, John Dewey's ideas for the progressive education movement. And sometimes people characterize that as if-- just stand back and kids will do wonderful things on their own. And of course, if you stand back, some kids will do wonderful things on their own. But I think we're very aware that you need a whole variety of supports as Natalie was talking about. So I think sometimes people get the wrong impression about what's going to be needed. And then people might get disillusioned or feel that doesn't live up to the promise if they do just stand back and say, ‘Let it work on its own.’” - Mitch Resnick

Show Notes

“I think sometimes there really is this misperception about this type of creative learning approach... it's growing out of, as you say in the chapter, John Dewey's ideas for the progressive education movement. And sometimes people characterize that as if-- just stand back and kids will do wonderful things on their own. And of course, if you stand back, some kids will do wonderful things on their own. But I think we're very aware that you need a whole variety of supports as Natalie was talking about. So I think sometimes people get the wrong impression about what's going to be needed. And then people might get disillusioned or feel that doesn't live up to the promise if they do just stand back and say, ‘Let it work on its own.’” - Mitch Resnick

In this episode we’ll talk about: