Science writer Matthew Ridley has described the innovation process as one of trial and error in which individuals combine pre-existing techniques and/or technologies.
One example: Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing were around for many years before innovators figured out how to put them together to revolutionize the energy market.
Another example: Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” were around for decades before some unknown innovator combined them to create the greatest song in the English language.
Likewise, a new policy brief posted to the Arizona Charter Schools Association website suggests that combining project-based micro-schools with rigorous live distance learning can create a new path, to scale, for high-demand schools and can unleash new opportunities for teachers while addressing equity concerns with pandemic pods.
A Phoenix radio host interviewed a 44-year (!) classroom veteran teacher last year. The teacher observed that the main problem with education today isn’t a lack of funding, which he said has “always been tough.” The real problem, he said, is that “the joy of teaching has been strangled out of the profession.”
This can and must change, and combining small education communities with rigorous distance learning just might do the trick.
If you’ve ever visited a project-based learning micro-school, you quickly see the joy so sorely lacking in most education settings. With Sal Khan, founder of a free educational video library that allows blending learning, as your scout-troop/school leader, you’re watching an excited group of kids engaging in 3-D print design. An education guide leads students through some daily academic work on computers, but then the students tackle group projects.
I watched students engaged in 3-D print design at a Prenda micro-school on the Apache Nation in San Carlos Arizona. These kids were not just learning, they were learning and loving it. These types of schools have great potential because they do not require educators to raise funds for multi-million facilities.
This style of education, which took an early hold prior to the pandemic, has been thrust into the limelight now through the advent of pandemic pods. Educators can address equity concerns, such as a low-income family’s ability to pay teachers and gain access to computers, with enlightened public policy.
Success Academy of New York developed another innovation to pair with micro-schools. Success Academy changed the roles of instructional staff for distance learning, with teachers variously tackling the roles of lecturers and small group facilitator/student problem solvers.
The most skilled math instructor in the network gave a live internet broadcast lecture via the internet. Students divided into small groups to interact with teachers to discuss the material and work out issues. Teachers then graded and monitored student achievement and scheduled individual online tutoring sessions with struggling students.
The Success Academy distance learning model is itself potentially revolutionary. In theory, the network could offer this version of itself to both enrollment lottery winners and enrollment lottery losers. Many parents on the waitlist might very much prefer this option over a spot in a district that numbers rather than names schools.
Education, however, is very much a social enterprise for many, as most of us want and need access to instructors and classmates. We need community. The Arizona Center for Student Opportunity brief referenced above calls for educators to combine Prenda-style micro-schools with Success Academy-style distance learning programs.
This proposal could take a variety of forms. Education service providers could reach agreements with pandemic pod providers to “adopt” them into their distance learning programs. Alternatively, high-demand schools could gauge interest in creating pods among their current students and their waitlisted families.
Equity-related concerns connected to pandemic pods could be addressed through funding students. Private choice programs focusing on disadvantaged student populations, such as Florida’s scholarship programs, could be used to help low-income students and those with disabilities afford micro-schools. Alternatively, public school distance-learning statues could defer costs.
In Arizona, Prenda operates schools through district, charter and private choice mechanisms. All Prenda students take the state’s AZMerit exam, and students whose education is funded through district and charter mechanisms have their results factored into school ratings.
In partnering with a Success Academy-style distance learning provider, the “mothership” would provide the live lecture, while the small group facilitation function would be conducted by in-person by guides. Different flavors of micro-schools can be created through affiliation with different mothership institutions. Teachers can run the show rather than being part of all-too-often hugely indifferent bureaucracies. All we need are some trailblazing educators and enlightened policy.
To paraphrase the Gen-X bard:
“With the schools out, it’s less dangerous! Here we are now, liberate us! Don’t feel stupid or contagious! Here we are now, educate us!”
In a recent interview with Sal Khan, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush suggested we need a common term for concepts such as mastery-based learning, personalized learning, competency-based learning, individualized learning and customized learning.
“We need to come up with a name that everyone uses,” Bush told Khan at a recent education reform conference in San Diego. “When you figure it out, send a memo out to the rest of us.”
Governor, I recommend we use the term ”customized education.” Here’s why.
All learning is personal. Thirty students sitting quietly in rows taking detailed notes of their teacher’s lecture are engaged in personalized learning. No two students assimilate the teacher’s words in the same way. We all interpret incoming stimuli through the lenses of our previous experience and knowledge. Since no two people have lived identical lives, no two people interpret information, such as a lecture, in identical ways. Consequently, all learning, including how well someone masters a competency, is personal.
When people use terms such as personalized learning, they are really referring to teaching, not learning. While 30 students sitting in rows taking lecture notes are engaged in personalized learning, the teacher is not engaged in personalized instruction. The teacher is using one-size-fits-all group instruction. This group instruction is what reformers want to replace with instruction that is customized to each child’s needs.
Progressive educators have been advocating for personalized instruction for at least 150 years. Public education adopted one-size-fits-all batch instruction in the late 1800s because it was scalable and personalized instruction was not. Our inability to scale personalized instruction has thwarted us ever since. What’s different today is technology. Technology that did not exist 30 years ago is now enabling entities such as the Khan Academy to make customized education possible for every child globally.
So why do I prefer customized education over personalized instruction?
Khan Academy does not provide personalized instruction for every child. But it does provide content and tools that make it possible for learners to customize their education.
Education is more than instruction. Many of my most powerful learning experiences have come while doing yard work. I listened to a thought-provoking discussion between Sal Khan and Jeb Bush, thought about their exchange while working in the yard, and then clarified my thoughts by writing this blog post. This is why the term you are searching for, Governor, should be broad enough to encompass external instruction and self-guided learning activities. And why I prefer customized education.
So why customized education and not personalized education?
The term personalized learning has become so ubiquitous that trying to explain why it is redundant and misleading seems overly complex and onerous. I’d rather reboot, dump the word “personalized,” and go with customized.
Customized education – the future of public education, workforce education, and civic education.
File this under things to keep an eye on for the rest of this school year: Over the next month, providers can start registering to offer classes for Florida's new course access program.
The program was codified by the state Board of Education at its November meeting. When it was first conceived, as part of 2013's digital learning legislation, a lot of the initial hype centered on the fact that the law opens the door to high school students taking Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, for credit in a select few courses covered by statewide end-of-course exams.
But its real significance goes beyond that.
Some education advocates see programs like the Florida Approved Courses and Tests Initiative as a new way to unleash entrepreneurial teachers and give students another way to customize their education that goes beyond simply choosing where they go to school. Maybe they're in one of Florida's 11 school districts without a physics course available. Maybe they just don't click with their assigned teacher. They might have some digital courses already available to them, but if things go as planned, those options should expand once the initiative debuts during the 2015-16 school year.
The same legislation that created FACTs also led to the creation of the course catalog and allowed students to take online courses across district lines. Taken together, these policies are enabling Florida's foray into course access — a term for programs that use technology to let students customize their education. It's a hot topic in education policy circles now, and was the subject of a panel discussion at last week's National Summit on Education Reform.
John Bailey, the vice president of policy at the Foundation for Excellence in Education, said the basic idea is that even students who attend a traditional campus can customize the courses they're taking by supplementing them with courses outside their geographic area.
The idea of competency-based instruction is not new. Florida educators were using technology to tailor student learning two decades ago, and it can trace its origin back more than a century.
But more recent advances in technology have allowed educators to begin upending the traditional "seat-time" model, in which students advance based on what they learn rather than move through the material in a fixed amount of time. That's one of the goals of Khan Academy's new "learning dashboard," which lays out "missions" for students to complete, with the idea that completing a mission will signal mastery of specific math standards.
Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, explained the significance of the organization's growth beyond video during a speech at this year's National Charter Schools Conference in Las Vegas. Right now, the learning dashboard is focused on math — perhaps the subject where learning is most cumulative. This is an excerpt from the keynote presentation he delivered on the conference's first day, edited lightly for length.
(Right now, at most schools), we shepherd (students) together at a set pace. Class time, there might be some lectures. They might do some homework. The next day, we might a review homework a little bit, get a little bit more lecture. And you can continue that cycle for maybe, about two or three weeks. And then you have an exam.
Let's say that unit was on basic exponents. And on that exam, I get an 80 percent, you get a 90 percent, and you get a 60 percent.
The exam has identified gaps. The person who got a 60 percent — 40 percent of the material, they didn't really get. Even the person who got an A, got a 95 percent, what was that 5 percent they didn't know? Even though that happened, the whole class then moves on to the next concept — say, negative exponents — pretty much ensuring that students are going to have trouble working on that.
And to put in focus how strange that is, imagine if we did other things in our life that way. Say, home-building. So you get the contractor in, and you say, 'You have a total of three weeks to build a foundation, do what you can.'
So he does what he can. Maybe there are delays. Maybe some of the supplies don't show up on time. Maybe some of the workers fall sick. And then, three weeks later, the inspector comes in and says, 'Well, the concrete's still wet over there. That part's not quite up to code. I'll give it an 80 percent.'
Oh, great. That's a C. Let's build the first floor. (more…)
Fox 13, a TV station in Tampa, Fla., did a nice piece this week about a unique partnership that shows how much and how fast education is changing. It’s between Khan Academy and Step Up For Students, the nonprofit that administers Florida’s tax credit scholarship program for low-income kids (and, full disclosure, co-hosts this blog). The story focused on Gateway Christian Academy, one of 10 private schools that accept scholarship students and volunteered to join the effort.
Like other partnership schools, Gateway Christian is holding “Khan Nights” to show parents how Khan Academy works, how the school is incorporating it into its curriculum and how it can make a difference for their children. As you’ll see from the clip, it’s using this technology, and reeling in a diverse group of moms and dads, all so it can maximize the academic outcomes for its kids.
As we wrote a few months back, the Khan Academy/Step Up venture is only one of a handful that Khan Academy has established with school districts nationwide, and the only one outside of California that involves a network of private schools. The way we see it, it’s a beautiful marriage between school choice and the latest learning tools, with a heavy dose of parental engagement thrown in. Thanks, Fox 13, for giving your viewers a peek at the future.
In a recent interview with Slate, Khan Academy founder Salman Khan is asked how he gets the education establishment to go along with his vision (and the vision of many others) of using technology to better customize learning. His answer doesn’t include the term “seat time," but he suggests most of “the establishment” (he uses air quotes, too) already agrees the practice is obsolete. Here’s his response in full:
I actually think the majority, almost everyone we talk to who are part of the establishment, are in violent agreement with us. And if anything, they’ve been frustrated, because they’re all well meaning, intelligent, talented people who care about kids. But they’ve, they’ve – sometimes not even been able to articulate it – but they’ve felt hampered. They say, yeah, I see that kid does not understand basic multiplication, but I need to forward them. In the existing system, it kind of was what they had to do. So I think a lot of them view this as a chance almost to get liberated. I think the stuff that – I wouldn’t even say threatens – I think the stuff that the infrastructure that will go away is this whole infrastructure around what is, what has to happen on Day 18 in the seventh grade in California? Or Day 28 in the sixth grade in Louisiana? That whole kind of scaffolding of state mandated curricula, I think that’s probably - I think will go away. And really, I haven’t seen anybody really defend that.
Also in the Slate interview (there are two other short videos), Khan mentions his company’s partnership with public schools in the Los Altos school district - and the incredible impact its approach is having on student achievement. Khan Academy also has a partnership with Step Up For Students, involving 10 private schools in the Tampa area that serve low-income students with tax credit scholarships. More about that here. More about the erosion of seat time here.
