The August, 2011 Wired article, “The New Way To Be a Fifth Grader” is subtitled “How the Khan Academy is changing the rules of education.” It may be doing that, or more likely it is not, but certainly there is real potential here. http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/ff_khan/all/1
The article begins with its author’s visit to a fifth grade classroom at Santa Rita Elementary in Los Altos, California, where Kami Thordarson’s math class is in session. I get the impression that each student has access to a computer both in the classroom and at home and that computers are the dominant tool in this class. It is not mentioned whether there is a standard textbook. Most students are working on material that would seem normal for fifth grade, fractions, decimals, percentages, except that one precocious lad is working problems involving inverse trigonometric functions (whatever those are; math was never my finest hour). How is such a thing possible? This class makes extensive use of the Khan Academy instead of or supplementary to a standard textbook. The Khan Academy characterizes itself as “a library of over 2,400 videos covering everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and 125 practice exercises, we’re on a mission to help you learn whatever you want, whenever you want, at your own pace… Learn almost anything for free.”
I have visited the Khan Academy website, http://www.khanacademy.org/ and browsed about in it, and it is truly impressive. I really should sample its wares by starting to work my way through Algebra, but I have not yet screwed up my courage to the sticking point. Each of the 2400 videos is a 7-14 minute lesson in the form of a “chalk-talk” (we hear the instructor but never see him). In addition, software is available to generate practice problems and to allow the teacher to track each student’s progress.
Impressive is, well, impressive, but what is really innovative is the way it allows a teacher to “flip” the normal sequence of instruction: “This involves replacing some of her lectures with Khan’s videos, which students can watch at home. Then, in class, they focus on working problem sets. The idea is to invert the normal rhythms of school, so that lectures are viewed on the kids’ own time and homework is done at school. It sounds weird, Thordarson admits, but this flipping makes sense when you think about it. It’s when they’re doing homework that students are really grappling with a subject and are most likely to need someone to talk to. And now Thordarson can tell just when this grappling occurs: Khan Academy provides teachers with a dashboard application that lets her see the instant a student gets stuck… ‘I’m able to give specific, pinpointed help when needed,’ she says.”
It occurs to me that more traditional teachers may see this “flipping” as upsetting the natural order in a most fundamental way, insofar as the homework problems are an early “test” of who best grasped the concept du jour from the teacher’s presentation and/or the textbook. Some of the more vociferous critics of Herb Grosdidier’s experimental program of 1968-1974 regarded the speed with which as student acquired a concept as being an important criterion for the sorting process that is grading.
Students move at their own paces. It seems to be working for Thordarson. “Only 3 percent of her students were classified as average or lower in end-of-year tests, down from 13 percent at midyear.”
“For years, teachers like Thordarson have complained about the frustrations of teaching to the ‘middle’ of the class. They stand at the whiteboard, trying to get 25 or more students to learn the same stuff at the same pace. And, of course, it never really works: Advanced kids get bored and tune out, lagging ones get lost [like I did] and tune out [I really tried not to], and pretty soon half the class isn’t paying attention.” All of us who have ever taught, excepting, perhaps, a few Exalted Ones, know the feeling.
There seems to be some sound, verified theory behind Thordarson’s experience. “[In] 1984, the education scholar Benjamin Bloom figured out precisely how effective [one-on-one instruction] is. He conducted a metastudy of research on students who’d been pulled out of class and given individual instruction. What Bloom found is that students given one-on-one attention reliably perform two standard deviations better than their peers who stay in a regular classroom. How much of an improvement is that? Enough that a student in the middle of the pack will vault into the 98th percentile. Bloom’s findings caused a stir in education, but ultimately they didn’t significantly change the basic structure of the classroom.” During the era of the late Herb Grosdidier’s experimental program, more students completed more math than ever before or since at Payette (Idaho) High School, although I no longer have access to the numbers. Why was the change not permanent? There were no suitable materials for Herb to plug into. He had to create his own on the fly, and everything had to be published on a spirit duplicator. All record keeping was by hand. It was insanely labor intensive, and eventually even Herb burned out on it and abandoned it.
Digital learning is all the rage this year. During the last session, the Idaho legislature passed laws requiring all Idaho students to take a specified number of online courses, although the exact number seems to still be in the process of debate and deliberation. The State Department of Education now wants to reduce this requirement from the original touted number, prompted perhaps by great negative public outcry, perhaps because it recognizes some very real logistical problems. We are told that digital learning is the wave of the future.
The premise seems to be that it good for kids to take digital classes just because they are digital. An underlying assumption is that the new technology can be paid for by using it to replace teachers.
But Santa Rita Elementary where Thordarson teaches seems to approach it differently. Here, the teacher is very much in place, using the Khan academy as a teaching tool in her classroom. Khan software fills a specific instructional need. This is far from the situation in Idaho, where the credits are required for graduation, as is the hardware (how it might be paid for, except by replacing teachers, is not clear), the software to be provided by approved commercial vendors. It is the difference between bottom-up and top-down, between being at teacher initiative and being imposed upon teachers. It is the difference between the technology serving the curriculum and the curriculum serving the technology. One way makes sense educationally; the other way makes sense, arguably, politically.
There is no reason why teachers in Thordarson’s district could not write their own instructional materials, tailored to their own particular needs. They could post them on their website or on a professional exchange network. Besides Khan Academy, they could avail themselves of materials created by other teachers across the nation. It could be an open-source revolution that could change the shape of instruction in America’s schools.
For many decades, textbook publishers were, by the scope and sequence of their texts, the unquestioned arbiters of curriculum, and by the structure of each lesson, arbiters of pedagogy. In recent years, teachers, department, and curriculum committees in many districts have made strides in the creation of curriculum, selection of appropriate materials, and devising strategies for presenting those materials in a way that best serves locally determined (with input from various local stakeholders) learning goals in accord with state and national standards. On line materials such as Khan Academy expand opportunities. By contrast, the states’ mandating on-line courses by state-approved purveyors seems a step backwards.
First comes the curriculum. Then come the materials and the methods of delivery.