I don't know if you got to the point in the essay where the author, a math teacher, talks about his proposed solution: flipping the curriculum aka "mastery learning." Khan Academy uses this approach. If you haven't read this very long piece
Yes, I read it. Who the hell posts stuff they haven't read?
You seem to be enamored of the Khan Academy and the author's proposed changes. They sound good, but every magic bullet that has been proposed to improve public education over the last century has sounded good on paper.
One of the main problems I see with the idea of integrating mastery learning on a nationwide or even statewide scale is that it will potentially open the door for companies who profit off of education, offering online college degrees for example, to be brought in and given lots of money to achieve something that is essentially a watered down version of "mastery learning" based on plodding through learning modules on the computer. Without smart, savvy, qualified teachers as guides to oversee the process, I am skeptical it will bring the profound change hoped for. kcar wrote:
I think No Child Left Behind and similar assessment-through-standardized testing approaches are only part of the problem.
Which is what I said below.
Sorry—only just noticed that you'd replied.
Yes, I read it. Who the hell posts stuff they haven't read? You're kidding, right? People do it all the time. Going off of memory here, but I don't recall that your first post mentioned the part of the piece where the author mentioned his use of mastery learning, so I wanted to point out that topic and discuss it instead. Frankly, that essay was long and I was mightily relieved to get away from a discussion of the shortcomings of standardized testing and letting failing kids graduate or advance to the next grade.
"You seem to be enamored of the Khan Academy and the author's proposed changes. They sound good, but every magic bullet that has been proposed to improve public education over the last century has sounded good on paper."
I'm impressed with Khan Academy's achievements and willingness to adapt. I think it's a good idea to let kids learn at their own pace. No, it's not the magic bullet and I doubt that there ever will be one. My guess is that mastery learning *has* shown up under a different name in the past, so I think we agree there. Certainly videos aren't necessarily better than books, so that's not the special sauce.
There are two things about online or computerized learning systems, however, that really work for me (and I think other people too). One, you can learn something without having to deal with another person or class schedules and physical locations. That apparently was a big deal for Salman Khan's nieces. He was tutoring them in math IIRC across the American continent by webcam. When their schedules fell out of sync, he started recording videos for them. The nieces eventually told him they liked the videos more than the live sessions! The more in-charge or empowered a person feels of his/her education, the more s/he will learn.
The other thing I like is online/computerized systems allow for smaller chunks of instruction interspersed with small tests providing immediate feedback. Khan Academy does this. This e-book introducing the syntax of JavaScript to beginners has the same approach: 1-2 pages of instruction on a topic, followed by 25 questions on the material just covered. If you get a question right, you move on to the next. Get one wrong and you're immediately shown the right answer before you see the next question. At the end of the 25 questions, the e-book repeats the questions you got wrong and lets you answer them again.
I don't know if you've ever learned a foreign language, but you pretty much have to embrace the fact that your communication abilities have been reduced to that of a child or stroke victim. You have to put your ego aside. However, most language courses give you very fast feedback: if you're supposed to say "I hit the ball" but instead utter "I hot the bowl", your teacher will correct your errors right away. That's a far cry from sitting in a giant lecture hall listening to a guy drone on about calculus and taking a couple of tests over a semester (oh, and it'll take week to grade them). I believe that the faster the feedback, the more you'll learn.
Immersion in the subject helps. Learning French in France, for instance, or learning auto mechanics by working on a car in a garage or learning football by getting lessons and coaching while playing football are better than listening to lectures in a large classroom.
"Without smart, savvy, qualified teachers as guides to oversee the process, I am skeptical it will bring the profound change hoped for."
Yes. Absolutely. I'm impressed with all the work that teacher did to get his approach off the ground. His vision of mastery learning sounds like it would take a LOT more preparation and coordination between teachers in order to work. And yes, there's the risk that educational "entrepreneurs" would just see mastery learning as a money-making scheme via watered-down videos and such. I get the impression that a lot of educational innovations get watered-down or perverted when governments try to scale them up and don't do enough work to maintain quality, rigor and commitment.
So yes, you need smart, qualified and DEDICATED teachers. Talent is a biggie too: some people are natural born teachers and thus a mix of educator, entertainer, mentor, leader and disciplinarian. Teachers also have to keep kids up to the mark and not let them slack off or slide through a subject. DC schools seem to do that on an incredible scale. School systems also have to let students, teachers and parents know that the kids will have to meet or exceed minimum standards to advance or graduate. New York state has exit exams called Regents exams (no idea how rigorous they are).
You also need parents who actually walk the walk when it comes to education. Kids can learn a lot outside of the school. Parents' attitudes about and involvement in education rub off on their kids. I think a lot of parents in DC (and yes I live there) think that the school will do all the necessary work to teach their kids or don't have the time to be more involved. People here aren't committed to education as they are in the Boston area where I grew up. The notion that learning a subject empowers and develops you as a person isn't popular here. There's an acceptance of learning enough to get by or fake it. The colleges and universities here, even Georgetown, are meh.
Mastery learning isn't the magic bullet, but it's a good start. You need to give kids a sense that they can control how they learn. You also have to provide them with structure, high support, high expectations, immersive educational approaches and rapid feedback.
It would be great if this country respected education enough to pay teachers good money and worked to move beyond lecture-style learning.
Final thought: standardized tests are largely a way for non-educators and people in government to cover their asses and blame other people.
I don't know if you got to the point in the essay where the author, a math teacher, talks about his proposed solution: flipping the curriculum aka "mastery learning." Khan Academy uses this approach. If you haven't read this very long piece
Yes, I read it. Who the hell posts stuff they haven't read?
You seem to be enamored of the Khan Academy and the author's proposed changes. They sound good, but every magic bullet that has been proposed to improve public education over the last century has sounded good on paper.
One of the main problems I see with the idea of integrating mastery learning on a nationwide or even statewide scale is that it will potentially open the door for companies who profit off of education, offering online college degrees for example, to be brought in and given lots of money to achieve something that is essentially a watered down version of "mastery learning" based on plodding through learning modules on the computer. Without smart, savvy, qualified teachers as guides to oversee the process, I am skeptical it will bring the profound change hoped for. kcar wrote:
I think No Child Left Behind and similar assessment-through-standardized testing approaches are only part of the problem.
Excellent worm's eye view of public school education in the US currently. Could have been written by a teacher from almost any school system in the US.
The limitations and flaws of the "One Size Fits All" educational approach that has been mandated by national pressure under the aegis of NCLB's high stakes testing requirements are highlighted; NCLB alone is not the sole factor behind the highlighted flaws; but it's passage almost two decades ago has served to amplify these flaws and led to a dumbing down of the K-12 educational process for a generation of students.
I don't know if you got to the point in the essay where the author, a math teacher, talks about his proposed solution: flipping the curriculum aka "mastery learning." Khan Academy uses this approach. If you haven't read this very long piece, skip to the author's proposal because it offers a way out of camouflaging students' lack of learning with tests.
(I)s there any feasible alternative? There is. Over the years, many educational thinkers have suggested that we adopt an approach generally known as “mastery learning,” which requires each student to master one topic before moving on to the next and gives each student as much (or as little) time as she needs to master each topic. Fast learners don’t become bored and slower learners don’t become overwhelmed. Every student learns every skill.
I’ve become convinced that mastery learning is the right model for my students and, with the full support of my school’s caring and devoted administrators, have spent the past three years trying to bring mastery-based practices into my classroom. I no longer lecture. Instead, I record all of my lessons and put my videos online. Students move through these lessons at their own pace, and they must show they understand one topic before advancing to the next. I think of myself not so much as a teacher but as a facilitator of inquiry.
This approach can be painful for students—most are not used to taking responsibility for their own learning. At the start of the year many students fall behind: They mistake my hands-off approach for leniency and spend more time in class watching YouTube than learning math. Yet over time, most students—none of whom likes being behind the curve—start to learn not only the content, but something more important: They discover HOW to learn. They learn to assess their own understanding, to ask for help when they need it, and to teach themselves and their peers without my guidance. By the end of the year, my classes run smoothly and efficiently.
...
Imagine if we divided each academic discipline into a series of topics and skills, arranged them in a logical sequence, and defined an end goal for each...What matters is that each discipline has a logical, step-by-step sequence of topics and skills to be learned.
...
Next, we define the criteria for mastery. A student can show that he or she understands linear equations, or poetry, or chemical reactions, or the Civil War, in many different ways. Students can take rigorous tests, produce final projects, give oral presentations or anything in between—witness AP and IB courses that have both exam and project components.
....
Finally, we overhaul the structure of a traditional high school by assigning classroom teachers to topics or skills, and not to courses. My colleague and I would no longer each teach the same, year-long Probability & Statistics course. I might teach data collection and analysis while he teaches probability and decision-making. Classrooms would become places of specialized, targeted instruction, focusing on depth instead of breadth.
How do students learn at such a school? Simple: They work in Room A until they achieve mastery, then do the same in Rooms B, C, D, and so on. Students would learn at their own paces and move at their own paces as well. No student would move to more advanced material before he or she has demonstrated authentic mastery of prerequisite knowledge.
I think No Child Left Behind and similar assessment-through-standardized testing approaches are only part of the problem. The pressure to pass marginal or failing students has been around for a long time. That pressure has likely gotten worse as education "reformers" aimed at an easy target—teachers—and demanded that school systems hold teachers accountable. It's a pretty simplistic solution: unions are protecting bad and lazy teachers, so we'll measure teachers' abilities through standardized tests. Lots of f$$%#ing tests.
Naturally, teachers started teaching to the tests. And when you have coarse measures of achievement like graduation rates that towns and cities use to measure a school's effectiveness, you're going to have kids unjustifiably pushed to the next grade. Especially in places like DC which have embraced charter schools and the idiotic notion that such traditional schools should "compete" with charters for the best students and sufficient levels of funding.
High school is a tough road for teachers and students. The coursework and grading are harder than junior high. Kids are in a weird stage between childhood and adulthood. They progress through the transitions at different rates and the different levels of success. Teachers have to be educators, enforcers, entertainers, surrogate parent and leaders—all for insufficient amounts of money. The best schools hold kids accountable and find ways to help the struggling kids through tough times. A lot of times a school's level of success comes down to support systems available to kids and the peer pressure amongst students to master the subjects taught. Both of those factors increase with the amount of school funding available and levels of educational attainment amongst parents.
Excellent worm's eye view of public school education in the US currently. Could have been written by a teacher from almost any school system in the US.
The limitations and flaws of the "One Size Fits All" educational approach that has been mandated by national pressure under the aegis of NCLB's high stakes testing requirements are highlighted; NCLB alone is not the sole factor behind the highlighted flaws; but it's passage almost two decades ago has served to amplify these flaws and led to a dumbing down of the K-12 educational process for a generation of students.
Betsy DeVos: She wasn't so much confirmed as given a receipt for her purchase.
I kind of chuckled at the idea that only one more Republican vote was needed to vote her down. As if they weren't just trying to send a message that even the Repubs didn't like this but weren't going to stop her and that the last holdout was gunning for future political reward.
Last month, publishing giant McGraw-Hill Education withdrew and destroyed copies of a US college level textbook because of complaints from supporters of Israel over a series of maps showing loss of Palestinian land from 1946, shortly before Israel was established, to 2000.
In response to this shocking and outrageous act of censorship of the Palestinian narrative from US schoolbooks, dozens of respected Palestinian, Israeli, and American academics have signed onto the enclosed open letter calling on McGraw-Hill Education to reverse its decision. Signatories include Rashid Khalidi, Noura Erakat, Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Sarah Schulman, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé, and Angela Davis. (...)
The operation of is to produce what may be called Men without Chests. It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They are not distinguished from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth nor any virginal ardor to pursue her. Indeed it would be strange if they were: a persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honor, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment which could debunk as easily as any other. It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.
And all the time – such is the tragi-comedy of our situation – we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
In third and fourth grade my son was using those grids (they call them "graphs" in his school), to do addition and multiplication but the students also used the "tradition methods" that we did - with carrying numbers and that stuff. Sometimes one method would be used as a "proof" for the other. It seemed to be designed to show that different methods could be employed and some students took more to one method than the other. My son doesn't seem like he has a preference usually, but since I have numerous pads of graph paper in the house (for some reason), he often preferred that grid system for multiplying five-or-six-digit numbers on his homework.
My early math learning was using wooden rods of scaled lengths (and colours) for different numbers. Finding the cube of a number by stacking them up was really fun.
I still suck at math but my advice to any young person is to learn as much math as you can stomach.
Oh jeez, you are so oppressed, just for coming in and asking a simple question while trying to gain enlightenment. The mean liberals of RP are harshing your buzz and pushing you to an early grave.
I think you missed a sarcasm tag, here's mine: < /sarcasm >
Sorry to deflate the power of the mean liberals of RP, but you're reading in too much for your own good ...
No one here is oppressing me to an early grave. Its a face value statement. My physical health is deteriorating at a noticeable rate. No sarcasm on my part, no woe is me. It just is what it is. Doubt I'll make it all the way through Hillary's second term.
I am firmly in the winter of my life and making the necessary adjustments. Curiosity is free. Answers obtained based on curiosity also help measure how well your oars are in the water. But on the other hand, it is what killed the cat.
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