The Messy Reality of Personalized Learning
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
This is personalized learning at its worst. Startups are marketing themselves to districts as a means of achieving the same outcomes with fewer teachers. That's harmful to society and will result in lower quality education for the poor.
Technology is a powerful tool for education but it is no substitute for teacher-student interaction. It's best used for administrative duties such as segmenting students into groups, aggregating data for reports, facilitating collaboration by making longitudinal student information more accessible and digestible to teachers. It's a useful replacement for textbook and handout based homework, and enables students to consume and information from a variety of sources. It's not a substitute for interacting with teachers.
Also, there needs to be more regulation to protect student information. FERPA (the law that's supposed to protect student data) makes student data less secure. Under that law, health records that pertain to the student's education (such as the diagnosis of learning disabilities) are no longer protected by HIPAA. FERPA has no such security requirements.
Curious as to why you say this because recently it seems like people are realizing you DON'T need a tradition teacher student interaction to learn, and more and more people are turning to the wealth of education at our fingertips instead of traditional schooling.
or put differently, traditional schooling is so bad that it is necessary to make classes smaller in order to give each student enough attention and opportunity to speak.
with individualized learning, as for example in montessori, that teacher attention is not needed because in montessori the teacher attention is individualized too. that is, while the teacher is paying attention to a particular child or group of children, all other children in the class carry own with their own work. so each child may get less time with the teacher, but that time is of much higher quality. it's a completely different learning dynamic, and one that interestingly is capable of allowing a single teacher to handle larger classrooms.
And my response is that I don't have to be a better teacher than a teacher, I have to be more effective at teaching my _one_ child than a teacher is at teaching my child as one of 30 children of widely differing abilities and behavior.
I've spent a lot of time in coaching and educational roles, so I feel pretty capable as a teacher, but I think the point remains that the best way to teach a roomful of children is unlikely to be the best way to teach an individual child.
You can replace in-person lectures and perhaps many kinds of rote exercises via computer interaction. You can even gamify the latter and provide automated feedback, which is quite helpful from the student's POV. But no, you absolutely can't replace the teacher altogether. Computer use in education also adds a ton of sedentary screen time to these kids' lifestyle that's not necessarily good for their health, so focusing on getting the best value for that use is incredibly important.
Educators know that not everyone needs a teacher, and most people don't need a teacher all of the time. The trick with high quality educators is two-fold, creating motivation for students to want to learn and stepping in to guide a student one on one when a student gets stuck.
While I haven't needed a teacher 50% of the time, I get stuck when learning. I then need a new perspective, or a new mental model, to get me thinking differently. This happens less and less as I get older, and find ways to replace a teacher with other stimuli.
A child isn't an adult. They need and want to have their hand held at certain times.
There isn't a substitute for a social interaction that goes beyond "did student 9471827 learn topic 14536?". Humans need to go over things multiple times to remember how to do it. Sometimes there's new learning. Maybe they think they know how to do it, but it doesn't feel right, and they need a partner or authority figure to say "yes, that's a good way to solve this problem or frame a perspective".
So to come all the way back around, I think most people know that we don't need a tradition teacher student interaction to learn, but we do want it at times, and the interaction definitely speeds up learning.
I'd argue even more anecdotally that a human will not trust a robot teacher unless they've had a good human teacher, and that the robot teacher resembles some characteristic of that teacher.
I realize that all of this is my opinion, but I hope it was interesting to you as a potential answer for the previous comment! Have a good one today
I will concede that for K-12 education, especially closer to the K side, having a patient teacher is certainly going to help students learn, and guide them when they are frustrated.
I was in the same situation, and that's where the TAs (Teaching Assistants) stepped in. And most of the time, it made all the difference. Professors for a lot of classes (but not all of them) were just glorified lecture material recital machines, however, the value of TA office hours was insurmountable. The difference between classes that had great TAs vs. classes that had bad TAs was extremely noticeable in terms of the amount of material I learned.
I agree with the rest of the sentiment in the thread though. I didn't need professors or TAs 80%+ of my time, but whenever I got stuck, a good explanation or hint from TA made all the difference. You could easily tell by looking at everyone's scores and knowledge who went to TA office hours and who didn't. Ironically enough, the scores didn't seem to correlate almost at all with lecture attendance.
This inspired me to become a TA myself later on, and I am very glad I did that. It felt really rewarding to be able to figure out that one extra little nudge of information that, if given to a student in struggle, made it click in their heads.
Similar teacher workforce, but actually using their time better
Replacing a career teacher with a low-skill babysitter who is half-disinterested does not seem like an improvement. Neither does having students glued to a screen all day instead of interacting with other humans. Those interpersonal skills are more important -- even in tech -- and an educational model like this would inevitably cut back on those by providing a cheaper alternative to human interaction.
I agree that you can't replace relationships with computers, but I'm not sure public school is such a fertile ground for great relationships, at least not more than any number of plausible alternative systems.
Maybe we can't replace those relationships yet, but I'm sure eventually it will be possible. Educational tech should have the ability to do much more than human teachers ever could.
Ha. Kids can interact with computers (or rather, tablets) earlier than they meaningfully interact with people. So not only is the replacement possible, it is already ongoing. The only question is how productive the computer-based interaction is going to be. Educational content handily beats weird AI-generated video-clickbait.
Should help identify gaps/misunderstandings. Should...
In my 1:20 math classroom, this didn't work, despite me asking specific questions. I've had to identify them myself years later by labouriously going through Khan Academy and other on-line resources.
Maybe your education, like everything else, is ultimately and necessarily your own personal responsibility...
BTW I think a brilliant tutor could do this, but they'd be worth (and charge) about $1,000 per hour.
Why not? Teachers can still do what they do best, which is answer questions and clarify things. You don't need a teacher to actually teach a lesson de novo each time. I don't see what's wrong with recording a (very good) lesson and just reusing that and having the actual teacher in the room answer ad-hoc questions.
I actually see this teaching model as potentially amazingly transformative for students in what would otherwise be bad schools. Rather than being held back by disruptive classmates, teachers having to teach to the lowest common denominator, etc. it could give students the ability to learn at their own pace and advance asymmetrically compared to their fellow students, even without funding for gifted programs. Basically it can be a more formalized montessori model.
By adding a qualifier such as "good" as in "good teacher", you've (inadvertently?) made your argument look more reasonable and correct. Some teachers are good, most are average, and many are bad.
The gp you responded to is talking about superior teaching recordings to help the teachers at bad schools. (But it can also help the good teachers by letting them put more energy into the 1-on-1 phase of instruction.)
There’s a lot of social and other benefits I gained from having real classroom learning, but I think we underestimate the value of online educations.
Instead of using the tech start up mentality, I think a lot more benefit could be done by helping teachers build relationships with there students & having open dialogue on what they like & what they don't. I get that this means throwing more money at lower teacher/student ratios which is hard to do but I think it would have a greater impact than tech. I say this as someone whose life & thoughts towards learning did a 180 once they were introduced to the internet & computers in the 90s.
Yes, computers can change the lesson plan & personalize per student faster & better than a teacher. But at what cost?
While multiple techniques exists, are there that many that a teacher can't try multiple out on there students and record how they respond? I feel if we had reasonable classroom sizes of 10:1 this would be fairly easy to do.
I also feel we could cut down the amount of info we jam into students heads & focus on learning the more important concepts. I believe Bill Gates & many others have started preaching this as well.
You don't need to learn everything but there are some core skills that we don't spend enough time on that will benefit us much longer.
This sounds like a nice, clearly stated, and eminently testable hypothesis. Do you have any such data?
While I agree that more teachers per student is highly effective, it's also expensive... and will unavoidably end up becoming cost-limited below the ideal level.
As a total side note, I wonder what other, potentially healthy changes can be made if personalized learning can be made to work well.
For example, I suspect that homogeneous age classes are not ideal. Spending half your life in a room with 40 other 10 year olds isn't something that happens outside of modern school systems. It's somewhat unatural. Maybe mixed-age classes can become possible again.
My experience was that a great teacher with a small class (<15 kids) was preferable to online courses. But great teachers are rare, and so are small class sizes. I found most K-12 teachers to be mediocre, unmotivated, and burdened with large classes (>25 kids in high school). Given that reality, online learning (or just self education) was more efficient most of the time.
> ...build relationships with their students & having open dialogue...
It's why the most elite schools in the world use classroom setups like "Harkness Method" (https://www.exeter.edu/exeter-difference/how-youll-learn).
The problem is that it's expensive, class sizes are a fraction of what public schools have to serve. Instruction is "mastery-based" which means that individual students don't move forward in the curriculum until they've demonstrated mastery of prerequisite foundational topics.
This is part of the reason why kids from wealthy families can end up in elite colleges. Connections help, of course, but the kids are well-taught. For them, learning disabilities are just obstacles that can be worked around, fall-behind one semester because of teenage stuff? No problem, they get tutored out of that rut. The same kinds of problems in an overcrowded and overwhelmed public school end with the student being stuck academically and not prepared for college.
I had one truly good math class during my secondary education, and the way the teacher conducted things sounds a lot like this. Small groups, sitting around a table, talking about the subject. The overall class size was much larger, of course. So what we had was a class subdivided into smaller groups, with the teacher circulating among the tables, spending maybe 10 minutes at a time at each one.
I suspect the real problem with this approach, at least from an American perspective, is that it's not easy enough to instrument for data collection. You can't measure "mastery", so instead you measure performance on multiple-choice questions. And then you tie funding to goals related to those tests. . . at which point, no matter what you _want_ the teacher's job to be, what they're really being paid to do is train kids to regurgitate information on multiple-choice tests.
I'm a professional data scientist, and, ironically, being one has resulted in me becoming a deep skeptic of the movement toward data-driven everything. "Data" is understood to be quantitative data, and not everything can be studied quantitatively, so it leads to people habitually deciding, intentionally or not, for better or for worse, to re-frame all their activities in ways that make them easier to quantify and micro-quantify.
To take another example, there's a whole lot of well-established research out there indicating what the best way to pick up a second language is. And you'll never see any of this knowledge being applied to language learning classes in American public schools, because its implications about how we should teach second languages are almost universally incompatible with the teachers' mandate to always be quantifying.
> Perhaps Harkness could be modified to be less expensive to implement.
But kids in early high-school and younger? Someone really needs to be there for them all the time.
BTW, I also had a math instructor that got miraculous outcomes by finely grouping students within each classroom according to skill. She would individualize attention to each group, and then move individual students up or down to different groups depending on their ongoing performance/mastery. She literally had what I would recognize today as a kan-ban chart on a blackboard in the classroom and we, the students, were the projects/products. Thinking back about it now, it must have been a herculean effort. It was also the 70's in a Catholic school and she had total autonomy. I seriously doubt a talented teacher could get away with something like that today.
That's so much of the problem right now. My wife teaches and to be blunt, she is not treated as a professional. She is subject to the exact same kind of intrusive rules that minimum wage phone reps are subject to.
Having come from nothing and seeing the vast difference in quality of education and outcomes, and seeing how terrible public schools are (even the good ones!) is really eye opening in one sense and not entirely surprising in another.
Seeing extremely un-intelligent kids from my high school go on to become public school teachers isn’t very reassuring.
It makes the teacher more of a facilitator/coach/mentor and also a proctor for administering tests.
This is a long article and headline of "personalized learning" and how it was described in the article was unfamiliar to me. That jargon of "personalized learning" seems to translate to "laptop-based learning". The laptop/Chromebook is the primary transmission of material. The teacher becomes a secondary role -- help answer extra questions/etc.
The author of the article is biased with the premise that the teachers that are physically there in the classroom are the best transmitters of the material. This is theoretically possible but reality is that you often get an ok or under-average teacher. The result is a bad teacher that confuses and frustrates the students instead of teaching them. With laptop-led learning, you could assemble the best instructors (or multiple alternative virtual teachers) instead of being restricted to the random quality of the local teacher where you happen to pay your taxes.
As a personal example... None of my math teachers from 1st grade to high school were as good as Grant Sanderson (3Blue1Brown)[0]. (I think many HN'rs might have a similar life schooling comparison.) I would have been better off with high-quality math lessons from a laptop and then consulting with the in-classroom teacher acting as a coach to supplement the videos. The alternative of watching teachers bored with their jobs did not help me learn math.
That said, I can see where some kids won't respond to laptops and need a live instructor to transmit information. This is where we can personalize the curriculum. Some kids use more laptop videos; others utlilize the live teacher.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw/vid...
I would separate the question into different parts to isolate the different roles an in-classroom teacher performs:
(1) a 1-way communication -- the act of purely transmitting information: E.g. compare effectiveness of on-site teacher saying, "sine is the opposite side divided by hypotenuse" vs virtualvideo teacher saying the same thing. For this info-transmission activity, many high-quality Youtubers seem to be better at explaining the topic. They have more insightful metaphors, better graphics, better presentation, etc. (Unscientific survey.[0])
(2) a 2-way communication -- providing a realtime feedback loop of skills assessment to the child. E.g. watching the child work out the problem on the sheet of paper and immediately noticing that she's not carrying a minus sign across a calculation and intervening at that moment. Of course, answering any questions the child has is also in this category.
The emphasis in my previous comment is that laptop-led teaching doesn't have to detract from activity (2) because that's the superior value that in-classroom teachers can provide over virtual teachers.
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[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F21S9Wpi0y8
Some viewer comments in that video:
+ 2.6k thumbs up: "Crazy how an 8 minute video, helps more then a paid teacher"
+ 690 thumbs up: "you are better than my math teacher"
+ 115 thumbs up: "I want you to know my math teacher sucks and you're the only reason I get A's. Appreciate it dude"
For whatever reason, the viewers' local on-site classroom teacher didn't "click" with them but virtual Sal Khan did. This is the missing pedagogy angle the author of The New Yorker article didn't highlight.
So much of our school problems are rooted in insufficient resources for classroom management, and an unwillingness to impose significant consiquences on the student and their guardians.
But an ineffective teacher also happens in college where professors do not need to deal with any misbehaving adult students.
Surely many of us have experienced a college class (in USA) being taught by a TA that can barely speak English. Even though the students are all quiet and respectful, nobody understands the lecture.
In those situations, the advantages of on-site presence of the professor is overshadowed by the disadvantages of the ineffective teaching presentation.
That's why many Youtube mathematics videos have comments such as:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly4S0oi3Yz8
+ 261 thumbs up: "Your videos are what college should be like. And isn‘t."
There are all valid questions (and not the only ones).
To me, those would be valid questions if we proposed Sal Khan -- and only Sal Khan -- to become the official & approved math video for all students which means we ban every other alternative teacher (virtual or in-class) teacher as a choice. Nobody is proposing this.
Even if (many) viewers don't like Khan (dislike his voice, his handwriting, whatever) and are still confused by his presentation, it's irrelevant because the underlying problem still remains: the local person that happens to be physically present in that classroom may be a terrible teacher for lecturing the students.
Therefore, optimize the lecture portion (the 1-way communication phase) by finding the best virtual teacher for the topic. This means 2 different children in the same classroom may be watching 2 different video teachers at the same time. (The in-class teacher can even help the student find a presenter that resonates.)
The remaining classroom task for the (possibly terrible) teacher is isolated to interactions like answering questions. The 1-on-1 interaction is the higher value phase of learning. The lecturing portion where many teachers drone on in a monotone voice and students are bored and tune out is the lower value phase.
The person who is there might be bad, but in person means that person gets real time feedback on if the student understands. This factor alone makes not so good teachers better than a video of the best teacher.
If Khan is not the only teacher that means the student needs to figure out which teacher is a good one. There are too many potential great teachers to wade through them all.
Then there are great lectures who will teach you something wrong. I don't care how great you are at presentation, if you are teaching the world sits on the back of a giant turtle you shouldn't teach. This example seems trivial but for a subject the student doesn't know how are they to know the teacher is right?
We can't train teachers fast enough. Not to mention the 20 different languages that India has.
We need this to work.
i don't believe this is true in the actual sense of the words. the problem is rather that we are not spending enough money on education. we could get many more teachers if that would change.
and it has to change regardless. with automation replacing all manual un-educated labor, education is the only way to avoid unemployment for a large number of people.
we need more teachers. many more teachers, and more effective teaching methods. but i believe financially this is all solvable if we are willing to solve it.
This is speaking from an American perspective but teaching is absolute hell. Teachers are more and more expected to pay for their own supplies, work 12 hour days, become counselors and therapists, plus advocates for special needs or abused children. Many students coming into kindergarten cannot read or recite the alphabet, but even worse many are not potty trained. The parents expect the schools to take care of 100% of the child’s education. And more and more in America, teachers are expected to shield students from real, actual bullets. One of my sisters left the profession when the state started talking about giving teachers guns.
All for $30-$40k per year. It’s not worth it. It’s too much work for too little money. Your job is constantly under fire and political scrutiny. It’s not even education anymore.
One of the districts I worked at didn't have an attendance policy and allowed students to do credit recovery with online courses. It's incredibly difficult to convince middle and high school students to struggle through learning when they know from their fellow students they can make up the credit later and just google all the answers since the proctors for credit recovery didn't really pay attention. They all had their phones on their leg under the table searching for all the answers while the proctor sat and ignored them.
now i had fantastic and very motivated teachers, and at that time i concluded that the low salary would help select for teachers that really believe in their work, and weed out those who are in it just for the money.
but paying less than a living wage is likely only attract the desperate who can't get a better job.
this is insane.
Who determines what her own pace should be, and how do they do that?
One of the biggest problems I've had when learning things on my own has been pacing. Suppose learning the subject requires first learning A, then B, then C, and so on, each part building upon the previous parts.
I'll tend to end up spending too much time on some parts. I might, say, get stuck on B because I'm not confident I'm good enough at B to move on, even though my B is actually sufficient to support C.
Other parts I don't spend enough time on. Let's say I find D uninteresting, but am really looking forward to E. I'll tend to rush through D, just getting a superficial understanding, and move on to E without adequate preparation.
incidentally, this is also how i work with my employees too. they report their progress to me daily, and if they are stuck somewhere or are getting off on a tangent i find a way to get them back on track.
I would think integrated testing and feedback could be built in and even done in "real time" as students are learning. For each section you can do a brief quiz, or constantly ask questions to measure engagement and comprehension.
This allows me to jump around my interests rapidly within the limited time that I have for learning difficult subjects, and means that the time that I do spend on particularly difficult subjects that require deep understanding isn't wasted.
I think that meta-learning is a key subject that any learner should start with, then messiness isn't a problem anymore. If I had learned it 20 years ago, I probably wouldn't have lost all of that wonderful college expertise.
I assume there are studies that show significant improvement in test scores as well as some studies that show no improvement or even regression.
I think how well it works depends on how well the students are supervised, the actual content of the programs, the parameters such as required learning rate, how well the particular software works or not, how closely the software tracks or does not track with the standardized tests, etc.
For things like algebra I had to use pencil. How do computer instructions handle work like equations and math?
Personalized learning is perhaps best observed in a homeschool-like environment.
I don't know how that replicates to other, better, more experienced teachers observations of it. If it is as important as I think, I don't know how you get that from a computer.
Learning and study abilities are tortured and murdered by the constant re-enforcement of "you can't, you're not smart enough, them over there, they are better."
Maybe I'm over emphasising a point that is less important than I think but also maybe not. It's a point that needs an airing here either way. Interested in your thoughts, especially if you have experience.
It was not championed by OLPC as merely one of the possible outcomes; individualized constructivist education was the motivating purpose for the project, around which hardware, software, and content development was organized.
They also literally have a term for a student who needs to learn the behavioral prerequisites for successfully learning. A "poorly normalized" student will be held back until they have developed enough to see that that need to change behavior to move on.
since in a montessori class each student does their own thing, a disruptive student can do far less damage than in a traditional class.
in a traditional class the disruptive student takes away attention of the teacher from the class. and class learning is indeed disrupted while that happens. in a montessori class, the teacher can take care of the disruptive student individually without disrupting attention from other students. oh, sure, it may happen that a a teacher-student interaction is disrupted once in a while, but in that case the teacher can tell that student to work on something else while they deal with the problem child. further, if we assume that most students are disruptive because they seek attention, i expect that such students will actually be much less disruptive than in a traditional class.
also, one of the key points of montessori is to teach children individually to work with their material on their own.
this goes so far that in some schools the beginning of the year is split in stages. on the first day only a handful of children are coming to school. the smaller group makes it easier to get each child to calm down and get used to the classroom setting. once they are fine, the next batch of children enters (the next day or a few days later). the first group is already quiet at work, and so the teacher now can deal with the next group, and so on until all children are present.
this not only allows the teacher to adjust their ways for each child individually, but doing that is the very point. therefore a montessori teacher has much more powerful tools at their disposal to deal with problem children and help them integrate into the classroom.
chances are that a child that is disruptive in a traditional class simply won't behave like that in a montessori class.
- I was not only intellectually neglected, I was intellectually poisoned. The result was worse than if I had just been left by myself as far as education and intellectual development. They don’t just not do their job, they sabotage kids
- I was subjected to bullying that has had mental health ramifications that persist even now. Everyone knew and nobody did anything. The teachers don’t do anything and the admins don’t do anything. They watch knowingly as kids under their care are viscously bullied, doing nothing.
Teachers are stupid. There is no other way to put it. Public education is a free daycare service. The kids who succeed in public school succeed in spite of the teachers and their circumstances, not because of them. It is not an exaggeration to say that subjecting a child to public education is abusive. Look at the average Americans understanding of maths and geography — they are basically retarded compared to other western nations. But nobody cares and nobody does anything. Saying that any alternative is too expensive is bullshit. Utter bullshit. Take grandma, who is starved for human interaction, and move her in. She watches over the child while he does assignments given to him by you and while he is tutored by starving PhD candidates and undergraduates who are actually smart and passionate. They will do it for peanuts. I know I would have when I was a starving student. Socialize the child by engaging in social activities such as soccer leagues and other things. Sleepovers, whatever. I just invented a method of education that is guaranteed to give you better results than a public school and probably costs a similar amount when you account for all the therapy you’d have to pay for from the bullying and whatever.