Salman Khan's Ideal Classroom

As a follow-up to the previous post (now that I've read the book), I'd like to quote Khan's description of his "ideal classroom" (pp. 203 et seq):

I would group together as many as a hundred students of widely varying ages. They would seldom if ever all be doing the same thing at the same time. And while nooks and alcoves within this imagined school might be perfectly quiet for private study, other parts would be bustling with collaborative chatter.
At a given moment, perhaps one-fifth of the students would be doing computer-based lessons and exercises aimed at a deep and durable grasp of core concepts. Let me pause a moment to stress this: one-fifth of the students. This is another way of saying that only one-fifth of the school day, or one to two hours, would be spent on the Khan Academy (or some future version thereof) and any peer tutoring that it might catalyze. Given the greatly increased efficiency of self-paced, mastery-based learning, one or two hours is enough...
Twenty out of a hundred are working at computers, with one of our team teachers circulating among them, answering questions...as they occur....augmented by peer-to-peer tutoring and mentoring...
What of the other eighty students?
...learning...by way of board games... teams, building robots... creative writing projects... original music...

Hmmm... and also Well.... I find him quite convincing on the virtues of self-paced, mastery-based instruction; convincing for a larger range of topics and students than I would have expected. It's easy to agree about the deficiencies of what he calls "Swiss cheese" instruction, which sends you to the next level if you manage to pass tests with 60% or so of the right information; from tutor work in high school on up to trying to help one of my graduate students pass a Ph.D. prelim, I've been inclined to believe that each of those holes eats more time than you would have spent filling it in the first place (unless, of course, it needn't be learned in the first place.) He seems to have convincing experience, actual data with high and very-low end students, that mastery is a realistic goal for KhanAcademy-style lessons; it certainly isn't realistic for a traditional classroom. (It was arbitrarily defined as ten-right-answers-in-a-row to get to the next little lesson, with "stuck and needs help" defined as fifty questions tried without achieving mastery; he says they refined these definitions some, but doesn't say how.) And it's clear why, if they work, these lessons should be far more efficient in student-time than traditional classrooms. Or perhaps than traditional tutoring...I recently showed my daughter how to use STDEV in a Google spreadsheet, and she cut short my explanation by saying that she'd look for it on khanacademy.org and I was proud. (I did look for it myself, and commented that she should check the variance lesson right before standard deviation.)

Still, my ideal classroom would be organized differently. I think. For one thing, there would always be one or more performances going on; in fact I think that each student would at any given moment be a member of a group generating another lesson video, with their own explanation/demo. And most would be involved in some kind of drama, or some kind of music; probably most (about 70% at HCS, it seems) would be involved in sports.

But as he says, there'd be lab groups and writing groups, of course. And many groups would have mainly virtual meetings, even with current (Google Hangout, Skype, etc) technology; even more so with the kind of table I've talked about before, where you and a friend or two are at one corner of a virtual table, whose other three corners are across from you on the other side of some big screens, but are probably not in your zip code. And possibly that can grow into a Second-Life avatar meeting where you put on your goggles, step into your Kinect closet, and you can sit, stand, move a step or two without hitting the physical walls, but all the time you're in a very very very big room. (Psst, look at that galaxy! Now, pick up the black hole at its center; shift your vision into the X-ray spectrum, and watch the time dilation on your wristwatch...)

On the other hand, maybe not.