[graniter]

It seems to me that education needs its own "industrial revolution." Education with 30 kids and a teacher in a classroom for 9 months doesn't seem to scale well. There aren't enough good teachers, and it's inefficient to have so many kids together learning the same thing, and the same time, at the same pace. It's too inefficient, and any improvements are going to be cost prohibitive.

I think we need to separate instruction, student work, and assessment. Students should be able to receive instruction in multiple ways (1on1, group, watch videos), do their work with something like TAs, and be assessed at their own pace.

Japan is starting to see to super-star teachers that parent pay for. Why do we always need a teacher to provide direct instruction in the classroom? Why can't we reward the best instructors, like Kahn, by having kids be instructed that way? The reason is because instruction, work, and assessment are not separated now.

I wish there were more experimentation in education, but since everything is a big ball of wax paid for with property taxes, there's a lot of reluctance for anyone to experiment with their kid, and since it's all or nothing, there just are minor experiments in the classroom

We need tech to find a way to scale the classroom and deliver it cheaply to students, and I think we need a separation of concerns in order for that to happen.

[shanev]

Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy thinks we should flip the classroom [1]. Students watch high quality lectures at home given by the best instructors on the topic, then do "homework" in class, with the teacher being there for assistance.

Sounds like a worthy approach to me. The problem is, how can you get a school board to adopt something like this? Who leads the effort? How can you implement changes to such an entrenched system?

[1]: https://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_rei...

[rtpg]

This is how my math classes in the early 2000s worked.

We show up to class. Teacher talked for maybe 5 minutes. Then we would sit down in groups of 4 and work on exercises. These exercises were very socratic method. Ex:

- Measure some right triangles

- calculate the squares of the lengths of the sides

- Do you notice anything?

- Here's some non-right triangles, does your hypothesis still stand?

Then some application of the introduced concepts.

Kids would help each other within the group, and a teacher would come in to help facilitate this.

This was all the math classes for about 3 years, and was great at helping kids learn to do math, explain solutions to others, and build basic social skills.

I've had a couple programming workshops like this as well, and they're invariably successful. Even the worst people can find help from either the teachers/coordinators or people who aren't having difficulties.

[j45]

There's a lot of buzzwords like classroom flipping floating around in education.

Part of the issue is the subject matter experts (teachers and instructors) are not up to speed on the capabilities of technology, some even fear being replaced, when the real goal is having the same teachers reach more students more effectively.

Education budgets rarely increase.

[jansho]

I see a gap for educating teachers about the potential of edtech :) Many will welcome the opportunity to focus class time on quality interaction.

[clintonb]

> Many will welcome the opportunity to focus class time on quality interaction.

No they won't. Some may value that opportunity, but I wouldn't say "many". I've seen the word "scale" tossed around in the comments. I'll add two more: economics and politics. Until we as a voting people elect leaders who value education, we will continue to see stagnant or falling education budgets.

EdTech will remove some teaching jobs. As a principal, if I can rely on the Internet educators to do a significant portion of the instruction, I don't necessarily need the best teachers in every classroom. In some class rooms I can simply use the bachelors-bearing teacher rather than the masters-bearing teacher. Some teachers recognize this, which is why they are anti-tech. They see how technology helped their community members in manufacturing and other industries, and want to avoid it.

[jansho]

> Some teachers recognize this, which is why they are anti-tech.

And that is exactly why educators need education about edtech.

Edtech exists in many forms. The YC list will give you a snapshot of that. Most of it are actually supportive rather than replacing the teaching role itself. You cannot compare to other industries like manufacturing because they are vastly different.

IMO it's a bit unhealthy for educators to be technophobic. The current students are from the tech generation, and most likely appreciate if their teachers could show more digital fluency. And yes, there are so many good and bad edtech tools out there, but the point is they can be pick-n-mixed to make their jobs easier.

> In some class rooms I can simply use the bachelors-bearing teacher rather than the masters-bearing teacher.

All the good teachers I know are not defined by their qualification, rather the passion, idealism and talent that they give. I had a high school physics teacher with a doctorate and he was not too great at explaining concepts. I also have a maths teacher friend with 3rd class honours in her degree, but is currently one of the most popular teachers in her school.

Other than Montessori's, most teachers are actually not that adverse to tech. But I think a basic digital training is needed. At the very least, learn how to find resources and pull them together. Learn how to use basic software, like rudimentary game-makers. Learn how flipped classrooms work, to design better homeworks and classroom sessions. Learn how peer-learning works, to encourage sharing ideas and working as teams.

There's so many ideas to make learning more exciting, with more meaningful interactions. Edtech is not a major threat, it can be a sort of freedom.

Edit language.

[graniter]

Before audio recording was invented, each town had it's own musicians and musicians generally didn't make much money. Same thing for other performing arts. And if you wanted to hear some music, you had to go to the musical hall. To see a performance, you had to go to the theatre. A lot of people didn't go because of the inconvenience in timing, distance, or cost. And the best performers likely weren't know beyond their town. Their reach was limited.

Once LP records and movies came out then these performance were more accessible to more people. And some performers became superstars. Not everyone would be superstars but a huge industry was born that really didn't exist before.

It seems to me we may be on the cusp of something similar with education. I don't think we've figured out how to do it yet, but at some point there will be easy access to quality education, just like now there's easy access to quality entertainment. I think the revolution will be in the replication and distribution at low cost, not in a change of educational methodology or in-classroom technology.

[matt4077]

> own "industrial revolution / doesn't seem to scale well / it's inefficient / improvements are [..] cost prohibitive / that parent pay for / can't we reward the best / We need tech / scale the classroom / deliver it cheaply / separation of concerns

I'm not disagreeing that it's a good idea to always look for ways to improve schools. But i'd like to point out that you're framing these issues in almost exclusively economic terms.

I fear a future where we've reduced schools to one or two easy-to-measure metrics. In fact that's almost exactly what No Child Left Behind's obsession with standardised testing has already done: measuring each teachers' and schools' individual performance and incentivising "high performers". Those tests are even standardised across regions, or even nation-wide, just as you're asking for.

I also don't think the problems you point are real, or new, or relevant: yes, a good teacher doesn't usually "scale". But why does everything have to scale? Good teachers create a connection to their students that usually cannot be carried over TCP/IP, and i have never seen technology used in schools that came close to the effect of an outstanding teacher.

The only realistic path to "scaling" their skills is by understanding the factors that allowed them to become role models inspiring their students, and trying to replicate them.

[graniter]

Yes I used those terms intentionally because I think the current problem with education is being able to scale good teaching. There are good teachers, but we don't have a good way to scale them. The industrial revolution provided a way to replicate and scale good manufacturing. So maybe we can learn from that. I don't mean that education should be done like manufacturing, just that the lessons of how to scale may apply.

[akerr]

Scaling teachers is often called team-teaching and coaching, i.e. training more teachers to be more effective. Effective teacher-teacher relationships are a good predictor for effective teacher-student relationships. Broadcast one-to-many relationships aren’t effective for bidirectional factors crucial to education such as feedback or empathy (this is where people are different to mass production or say entertainment).

[jansho]

> I think the current problem with education is being able to scale good teaching.

Well, I don't think that's the only problem with education.

Scaling good teaching, huh. Tackling this with direct technology is difficult, things like message boards for teachers are a bit crude.

So perhaps another way of approaching it is better training and support for teachers - and this is where tech can be used as support. Example, shadow a well-respected teacher with a camera, and post regularly on YouTube while encouraging open discussion.

Actually there is a lot of this content already (check out "Blended Learning" on Coursera, for example) so perhaps the real problem is actually aggregation and distribution.

[ComSubVie]

We're currently introducing "self paced studies" classes in our school (age group 14+), where the students get instructions (digitally, videos, slides, ...) and worksheets and the teacher helps them only when/where necessary.

It requires a lot more self organisation on the students side (that might be seen positive or negative) and overall the student success is similar to "classic" classes (but we've just started the second year, so we hope that get's better with experience - on the students and the teachers side).

The downside is that the preparation of the learning materials is much more work for the teacher than for a classic lecture in front of the class (but that also might get better with the years ...)

[jpereira]

It's kinda crazy that assessment has been coupled with instruction for so long, it pretty obviously creates a warped incentive model that stands on some real shaky ground.

I think the model also doesn't scale well for assessment, which prompts the creation of few, ineffective, but highly scalable assessments upon which the functioning of the entire system rest, which in turn prompts practices like teaching to the test. This creates even more messed up incentives but this time facing students and teachers as opposed to institutional practices.

I think that assessment, when decoupled, can't be done with an institution or institutions. Instead we need social networks that use a consensus process to define knowledge and who has it.

[graniter]

Agreed. I think about the analogy of interchangeable parts and if that might apply to education. Maybe teachers should just teach and assessors should assess. Interchangeable parts made it so equipment could be more efficiently be manufactured. But that didn't preclude there being a lot of different types of equipment. In fact, there's probably more types of equipment because of interchangeable parts. So for education, having an assessor focus on assessments, independent and separate from instruction, might make it so that there could be easier to assess and more types of assessment, so the teacher doesn't have to always do it. And that might help compare results across teachers.

College Board owns SAT, AP, and (essentially) Common Core so there's been a trend to tighter coupling. I like the idea of an AP Test that anyone can and be assessed separate from the teacher. Same for SAT. I think we need more of that model, not less.

[jpereira]

I don't see the advantage of tying assessments to singular institutions especially ones structured like College Board. What this promotes a bottleneck of what can be communicated to others meaningfully. Currently the SAT can be broadly communicated (because CB and others have invested very large amounts of resources into it) and so students optimize for it. Instead they could be putting their efforts to towards learning that is more personally and socially valuable.

I don't think this is just because the SATs are bad tests but fundamentally emerges from the institutional single source of truth model, where the incentive is for the institution to make their test as general/broad as possible and the most broadly accepted , as to capture the most students and hence fees.

[germinalphrase]

I agree that we need more and better assessment - but I don't understand why we would allow a private body to do what should be a utility function of our educational system. Currently, the College Board is able to fill this niche (at great cost) due to a lack of trust in the assessments of individual instructors. Rather than further increasing the cost of assessment by expanding the use of private arbiters, we should seek to make the assessments that are already taking place (in far greater number and scope) more reliable and trustworthy.

I believe this would take the form of a dedicated assessment tool that allows teachers to create individualized assessments JIT based on - or in concert with - their planning and performance workflow. If I'm teaching a structured lesson on polynomials, I should be able to create a valid assessment simply be requesting that one is made. My students should be able to take that assessment on the spot and the results should be immediately available.

I will take assessments with 80% confidence of validity 10x/week over assessments with 100% validity once per year every. single. time.

There's more to be said here - but that's the gist.

[graniter]

Why not have multiple assessors? Let people/parents/whoever pick who they want. Some schools use ACT and others SAT. Having a single assessor seems suboptimal. Alternatives tend to keep things more in check.

[philipps]

I like the concept of community-driven recognition, but I would caution against separating assessment from learning (if you used "instruction" to mean the moment when learning happens). Communities that engage in collaborative work (like open source projects, or guilds) are very good at surfacing and recognizing expertise. Making assessment a separate process increases the risk that we measure the things we can count, rather than the things that really count (butchering the Einstein quote).

[jpereira]

I definitely see where you're coming from, but I think the danger there is not necessarily anything to do with the coupling of assessment and learning but the coupling of assessment with the learned, i.e those who possess a skill/piece of knowledge/trait should be the ones who define the assessments around it. I like that you bring up guilds because that's very much baked into their process I think.

[j45]

Assessing Competency and Outcomes is one thing when done in a learning environment and quite another in the real world.

If students need to be prepared for the real world, this will need to increasingly become reflected in the amount of time spent in real-world learning vs in-classroom.

The question becomes - how will real world learning get to the classroom to reach the student, and how can the classroom meaningfully be with the student when they are with the real-world?

[jansho]

Interesting that you mentioned superstar tutors. Their classes tend to be large too, I've been to one that's close to a hundred pupils. A noticeable difference is that their sessions tend to be a lot more entertaining and emphasise on "tips and tricks" - not sure if school classrooms should follow the latter trend though.

It does show that it's possible to teach a large class effectively. Teaching talent makes all the difference, with technology to support it.