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Comment by lkdfjlkdfjlg | Hacker News Reader

> And there are plenty of teachers who are incentivized to use easy, fun, low-accountability, hard-to-measure practice techniques that keep students, parents, and administrators off their back.

I've been visiting schools in London and I've noticed that teachers/headmasters "sell" their schools with claims that their schools are "inclusive" or use "play based learning" or "great activities" etc. Everything and anything, but being serious about learning. I kind fo get the impression that the approaching to schooling is to get kids off parent's backs. Like "we'll take them, they'll have fun, don't worry about it". Extremely frustrating.

If anyone has here experience with schools in London, shoot me an email and lets talk? (email in profile)

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There's a lot of that too in the USA. Unfortunately, the strategy works because the learning debt doesn't come due until the students graduate, and at that point, it's somebody else's problem.

Parents get sold an idea that their kids are learning, but this learning isn't actually verified along the way, so nobody is held accountable for making it happen.

(Sure, the kid might say they're learning and the teacher might say they're doing a great job, but can you really trust that when both parties are incentivized to say that learning is happening and penalized for saying that it's not?)

By the time the kids graduate, the learning debt is so massive that it's easier to just change the narrative. Johnny got smacked in the face by math class at college and no longer wants to be an engineer? It hurts too much to accept the truth that life could have been different if he had seriously learned math in high school. So instead it's "ah well, engineering is hard and Johnny was never really cut out for it." Or even "Johnny's engineering class is unfair."

Years ago I was watching so-called "best practices" videos on teaching estimation in early primary. I was astonished. Often the skill being coached seemed to be participative performance in a collaborative pretense of understanding. What to do, and not do, so we can both pretend learning has occurred and move on. With the teachers themselves largely unclear on the concepts.

Ongoing formative assessment is usually closely associated with instruction, with attendant conflicts of interest. I wonder if say LLMs, might transformatively permit fine-grain and adaptive assessment. So a "what have you been learning?" dialog for objective identification, and then assessment across the objective neighborhood. With potential for tutoring of course. But here emphasizing a possibility for rapid verification of learning.

> Often the skill being coached seemed to be participative performance in a collaborative pretense of understanding. What to do, and not do, so we can both pretend learning has occurred and move on.

And the more you do that, the more you're shutting off any possibility of any learning occurring in the future (because the student will not have acquired the prerequisites for whatever they're supposed to be learning).

Think you could find a link?

Sorry, no. Creating a search-based PIM over old backups seems a doable thing. But for now, hmm, youtube has a "before:2015" syntax..., but still, "teaching estimation" or "estimating jellybeans" or blocks, or etc. And some education sites used to self host videos. :/

It wasn't anything singular. Telegraphing/hinting at the desired response. Questions series amenable to surface pattern matching, rather than scaffolding or probing understanding. Coaching for response rather than for understanding. Lack of clarity on why estimate, and how.

Except for that last... I imagine having a film crew hovering was not low stress, especially when things weren't going well. And at the time, when early-primary estimation was still a newish thing, having even a crufty idea what it could look like might still be worthwhile training-wise. Hopefully similar work would now be better?

Getting to top schools is more competitive then ever. For all the complaining about kids not learning, they are actually learning more then we used to.

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