Online resources are incredibly valuable as supplementary material but they can't replace the culture and bond of small group learning
In poor performing schools, there are multiple reasons for poor observed outcomes.
None of these need to happen.
Keep small group learning and have adults support learning. But there is no reason for a teacher to explain something when Khan academy has already done it and often done it far better.
>But there is no reason for a teacher to explain something when Khan academy has already done it and often done it far better.
You're skipping the often difficult task of getting the students to properly engage with khan academy.
As someone who is very much in favour of online education, this is still a pretty big unanswered question.
My response to that would be to ask to what extent this is being done in the classroom. Much like in the workplace prior to covid, people mistake physical presence for actually doing work. And if the classroom is then replaced with online learning with the ability to play back lessons and study at your own pace, how do you define "engagement"?
I think my interest in programming as a kid pushed me to online learning and taught me to be independent. Most of my friends barely went beyond what the teacher covered.
I still think that school as an environment where you see and interact with other students and tutors is useful - but merely for a social purpose. Front lessons can't disappear early enough.
How do you force them to engage with the content?
Schools have many impact vectors, forcing content learning is just one of them, and not necessarily a good one, I'm biased into thinking it's actually bad but it's overcompensated by its side-effects: place of gathering, exposure to higher-than-average smart people (teachers), introductions to some branch of knowledge, etc, and of course, forced-content consuming from interested students that probably would get better results from a self-paced learning system like Khan-Academy
Interestingly, you can find bad teachers and bad schools at all points of per pupil spending. Money is an important variable, but not the only significant variable effecting student outcomes.
I think we should radically rethink teaching. We can support much better outcomes for far more kids by reducing the dependance on the quality of your teacher, school and school district.
I think it would be easier to get kids to engage with Khan and online instruction in general than to fix failing school districts and failing schools. Use the schools as support. Many are already failing at their primary task as first line instructors - just take it off their plate.
The current teaching model simply doesn't scale. It worked well in the past, when most people got like 4 years of elementary school, and a few selected ones studied longer. Now we want everyone to sit at the school desk as long as possible, and preferably in small classes. (Yes, I understand why small classes are better. I am just saying we can't afford them for everyone without compromising on teachers' quality.)
Just guessing the numbers: if people live 80 years on average, and spend maybe 15 years on average at school, that is like 20% of population being students. If you want 1 teacher per 20 students, that is 1% of population being teachers.
We all have an idea of what an "ideal teacher" should look like. And some of us actually met someone like that in real life.
But 1% of population having the required skills? Also, there are other professions competing for talent. If you make all good programmers teach computer science, who is going to write code? Similarly, who will do surgery, etc.
What currently happens is that rich people (plus a few lucky non-rich people) succeed to get the best teachers for their kids... and the rest have to deal with what is left for them.
With sources like Khan Academy, everyone on this planet could have a top-quality education. You only need to make the great video lecture once. It can even be translated to other languages by other people, who don't need to be good scientists or educators themselves, just good translators. Education could be free like, dunno, Linux or something.
And yes, having a good human teacher is better than watching video. I am just saying it is a luxury that most students don't get. But everyone could watch the great video. So maybe we could change the school to be more like... uhm, maybe watching the videos together at school, and then having a debate about them? Then doing the related online tests, and again having a debate about what went wrong?
We already accept written textbooks. We should do the same with videos.
I think that the point of textbooks is to lower the required subject matter expertise bar for teachers, leaving them to focus on teaching the material.
Unfortunately, when a teacher is merely familiar with the material rather than understanding it deeply, they will find it difficult to explore multiple (valid) ways of explaining it to students until it 'clicks' for each one, which means students often fall back on rote memorization and mechanical competence.
A video of a good (even great) teacher is no more interactive than a textbook, so if the student doesn't happen to 'get' the explanation as it is presented they are going to fall back on memorization and mechanical competence in exactly the same way.
There are interactive learning environments with extensive libraries of content that explore material in multiple ways as needed (as indicated via assessments) by students, but AFAIK they are all proprietary.
Without textbooks, it wouldn't be any better. Only the kids wouldn't have a secondary source of information.
I am completely in favor of having better teachers. I just don't see the way to find them, and people were already trying for decades, so whatever idea I would come up with, someone probably already tried it. (I know a few people who are working on a reform of mathematical education. It is from them that I know how the actual sitation is even worse than I imagined.)
> A video of a good (even great) teacher is no more interactive than a textbook
Agreed. Sometimes the video can contain helpful animations.
My hope is that the videos could be updated more flexibly than the books. When you print a book, the next version comes in a decade. There are known errors in textbooks, but no one is going to spend money to reprint them again, just to fix the errors. It we could have the books online, we could fix the errors as they are found... but most people are not going to read books online. However, with videos hosted online, I hope it would be possibly to, dunno, add the errata as subtitles, or something.
Another hope is greater fragmentation. A teacher is unlikely to recommend one chapter from one textbook, and another chapter from another textbook. Or recommend two textbooks, like "if you didn't understand the explanation in the first one, try the second one". With videos -- here I assume there would be a free version online -- this could be easier.
I have seen many videos recorded by teachers during COVID. Some of them quite ok, considering the authors are amateurs. But the thing I like most is that if you have five teachers that teach the same grade, and make the videos for the whole year, you get five alternative videos for each topic. Now when anyone says "I don't get it", you can easily give them four more links and maybe that will help.
Elementary school education is an area where you really need to think about how your solutions scale. If you do the right thing once, literally millions can benefit from it.
There's a surefire way to increase the supply of good teachers, increase salaries & benefits. Reduce classroom sizes. Give teachers adequate time to plan engaging lessons and make personal connections with students, their families, and the community. Teaching is a miserable job with low autonomy, high stress, a low pay ceiling, a rigid pay scale, and is absolutely draining.
>We can support much better outcomes for far more kids by reducing the dependance on the quality of your teacher, school and school district.
Sure, but the whole point is that this is much easier said than done.
Do you have time in the classroom?
This is the problem. There aren't enough good teachers. Salaries/benefits/class size/prep time are a function of funding. Low autonomy/high stress are the result of our regulatory demands that appear to be on a one way direction: even more requirements and testing.
One particular friend left high end consulting to become a HS math teacher in an inner city school. He came with an academic background - having taught for a bit in colleges. Very optimistic. He left after 4 years because the number one problem in his classroom was keeping the kids focused at all. As he put if he had three concepts to cover in 50 minutes, he was lucky if could get 1 covered for the 2 or 3 students among the 30 that were trying to pay attention.
He was a good teacher and paid well. The school, school district, the community had complex problems: low income, crime, food insecurity, parents who had to work multiple shifts, etc. He couldn't solve all these problems before explaining right triangles.
I don't believe the model that we have today will survive the next 25 years.
I agree that good teachers and good schools are necessary. But we don't seem to be generating or supporting enough of them. So I think the solution is to look elsewhere entirely. Break up the problem. Remove the dependence on good teachers and good schools.
BTW, if you're a teacher. Thank you for what you do.
>So I think the solution is to look elsewhere entirely. Break up the problem. Remove the dependence on good teachers and good schools.
I think this comes to our fundamental disagreement. I just don't think this is possible nor a good path to pursue.
Thanks for taking the time to engage in the back and forth!
> There's a surefire way to increase the supply of good teachers, increase salaries & benefits. Reduce classroom sizes.
I don't disagree, but either one of those solutions alone is a pretty hard sell, trying for both at once isn't going to get much traction.
Personally, I suggest focusing on classroom size first, as it should improve the performance of existing teachers and at least make the job less unattractive to new teachers.
This has all been done to very, very little effect.
Reading, Math and Science scores are basically flat since 1970. K-12 employee numbers have almost doubled over the same period and costs per student have almost tripled.
https://www.cato.org/blog/public-school-spending-officials-v...
Side note: This also increases demand for teachers, because any single teacher now teaches fewer students.
If you reduce class size by 1/3 you need 50% more teachers than before (at the same workload, to teach the same number of students). If you reduce class time by 1/3, you again need 50% more teachers.
Citation is needed here. I'm not buying that Khan Academy has better outcomes just because this is HN and the internet is cool.
Where is the evidence that Khan Academy is better?
Rant: Any one thinking it's easy to teach should try it sometime. I get especially fluffed up by would be reformers who've never taught. eg Gates Foundation. While I appreciate the interest, deploy all y'all whackadoodle ideas against your own kids before torturing the rest of us.
Source: Mom was a special ed teacher for 20 years. Incredible how many people knew so much more about how to do her job than herself.
That makes two of us.
Some of my students referred to it as The Power.