The K-12 Teacher and the Computer

On "the deconstruction of the K-12 teacher", we see When the Computer Takes Over for the Teacher - The Atlantic

I think it used to be taboo for teachers to borrow or buy plans written by other professionals, but it seems that times are changing. Just last week, I spoke with a history teacher from Santa Maria, California, who bluntly said, "I don’t ever write my own lesson plans anymore. I just give credit to the person who did." He explained, rather reasonably, that the materials are usually inexpensive or free; are extremely well made; and often include worksheets, videos, assessments, and links to other resources. Just as his administrators request, he can focus on being a facilitator, specializing in individualized instruction.

I’ve started recognizing a common thread to the latest trends in teaching. Flipped learning, blending learning, student-centered learning, project-based learning, and even self-organized learning—they all marginalize the teacher’s expertise. Or, to put it more euphemistically, they all transform the teacher into a more facilitative role....

Note that there's no claim here that the teacher is being marginalized; it's the teacher's expertise. And that might make a fundamental difference in who is qualified to be a teacher, and what pay scales should eventually be. Interesting.

Boys (mostly) Won't Be Girls

Everybody's different. Sometimes one group of individuals seems substantially different from another. Stop Penalizing Boys for Not Being Able to Sit Still at School - Jessica Lahey - The Atlantic

According to the book Reaching Boys, Teaching Boys: Strategies That Work and Why, boys are kept back in schools at twice the rate of girls. Boys get expelled from preschool nearly five times more often than girls. Boys are diagnosed with learning disorders and attention problems at nearly four times the rate of girls. They do less homework and get a greater proportion of the low grades. Boys are more likely to drop out of school, and make up only 43 percent of college students. Furthermore, boys are nearly three times as likely as girls to be diagnosed with Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Considering 11 percent of U.S. children--6.4 million in all--have been diagnosed with a ADHD, that's a lot of boys bouncing around U.S. classrooms....

Hmm....sounds like 4.8 million boys and 1.6 million girls. You wouldn't want to forget the 1.6 million by creating a boys v. girls division, but on the other hand even that might be better than what we have now. The book being described apparently sorts out results from a survey describing

eight categories of instruction that succeeded in teaching boys. The most effective lessons included more than one of these elements:

• Lessons that result in an end product--a booklet, a catapult, a poem, or a comic strip, for example.
• Lessons that are structured as competitive games.
• Lessons requiring motor activity.
• Lessons requiring boys to assume responsibility for the learning of others.
• Lessons that require boys to address open questions or unsolved problems.
• Lessons that require a combination of competition and teamwork.
• Lessons that focus on independent, personal discovery and realization.
• Lessons that introduce drama in the form of novelty or surprise.

I suspect that, in the end, we want all of those to be available -- not compulsory -- for kids and groups, some in formed in person and some by telepresence.

Or then again, maybe not.

Networks of Imagination

Ken Bausch mentioned this last December; The Global One-Room Schoolhouse: John Seely Brown | DMLcentral

In this video, which contains the highlights of his “Cultivating the Entrepreneurial Learner” keynote at the 2012 Digital Media and Learning conference in San Francisco, he introduces the fascinating notion of “a global one-room schoolhouse through networks of imagination.”

It seems to me that this is quite compatible with Sal Khan's vision (and book) that I've mentioned a few times, but it's an interestingly different point of view. I'm inclined to see it as a mix of Khan with some of Yong Zhao's World Class Learners, but that oversimplifies as usual. I do see him as detecting and approving a trend towards tools like Scoot & Doodle | Get Creative Together, which has just received fairly major support from Pearson among others.

Google+ Hangout App Scoot & Doodle Raises $2.25M Seed, From Valley Angels & Pearson, To Get More Kids Learning Through Play | TechCrunch

Well, maybe not just kids, or just play; I'll add some emphasis in a quote from the GeekDad report on Scoot & Doodle: Makes Google Hangouts a Collaborative Playspace | GeekDad | Wired.com

essentially, it is an app that works with Google+Hangouts and lets you type, draw and engage in a visual and tactile way – as well as through video and voice. In my use of it I have found it to be really stable and offer a fluid and worthwhile experience whether with my kids or with business colleagues. Like many startups there appears to be more potential applications than you can imagine; however, kudos for both the Scoot & Doodle team and Pearson for seeing the potential of this in the education and learning space.

And I certainly approve of the idea that education works off study groups that fit in a Google+ Hangout. That works.

Or then again, maybe not.

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.