“Hopes that the internet can improve teaching may at last be bearing fruit”
THE 12-year-olds filing into
Courtney Cadwell’s classroom at Egan Junior High in Los Altos, a leafy suburb
of Silicon Valley, each take a white MacBook from a trolley, log on to a
website called KhanAcademy.org and begin doing maths exercises. They will not
get a lecture from Ms Cadwell, because they have already viewed, at home,
various lectures as video clips on KhanAcademy (given by Salman Khan, its
founder). And Ms Cadwell, logged in as a “coach”, can see exactly who has
watched which. This means that class time is now free for something else:
one-on-one instruction by Ms Cadwell, or what used to be known as tutoring.
So Ms Cadwell, in her own web
browser, pulls up a dashboard where KhanAcademy’s software presents, through
the internet, the data the children are producing at that instant. She can view
information for the entire class or any individual pupil. Just then she sees
two fields, representing modules, turning from green to red, one for Andrea,
the other for Asia. Ms Cadwell sees that Andrea is struggling with exponents,
Asia with fractions. “Instead of having to guess where my students have gaps, I
can see it, at that moment, and I walk over to that one student,” says Ms
Cadwell, as she arrives at Asia’s chair.
While the other pupils continue
to work at their own pace and at different problems, Ms Cadwell now spends a
few minutes just with Andrea and Asia. Soon Andrea has an epiphany and starts
firing correct answers, getting, in KhanAcademy’s jargon, a “badge”, then going
“transonic”. A few minutes later, Asia also gets a “streak”. She lets out a
shriek. Ms Cadwell, with a big smile, is off to another pupil. “The growth in
these kids is just staggering,” she says. “This is the future. I don’t see how
it couldn’t be.”
This reversal of the traditional
teaching methods—with lecturing done outside class time and tutoring (or
“homework”) during it—is what Mr Khan calls “the flip”. A synonym for flip, of
course, is revolution, and this experiment in Los Altos just might lead to one.
For although only a handful of classes in this public-school district tried the
method in the last school year, many other schools, private and public, are now
expressing interest, and the methodology is spreading.
Indeed, philanthropists such as
Bill Gates have such high hopes for the new method that they have given money
to KhanAcademy, a tiny non-profit organisation based in Mountain View, next to
Los Altos. This means that the more than 2,400 video lectures, on anything from
arithmetic and finance to chemistry and history, will remain free for anybody.
If KhanAcademy were merely about
those online lectures, of course, it would be in good but large company.
Increasingly, teachers, professors and other experts make their talks available
online: on iTunes, YouTube or university websites. Some, such as Michael Sandel
at Harvard with his philosophy lectures, have become minor celebrities. More and
more sites exist purely to spread learning—some free, such as
AcademicEarth.org; others not, such as TheGreatCourses.com.
Watching lectures online, or on a
smartphone or iPad on the go, has advantages, as Mr Khan has discovered from
the huge number of comments he gets on his site. Children (or adults, for that
matter) need no longer feel ashamed when they have to review part or all of a
lecture several times. So they can advance at their own pace.
But lectures, whether online or
in the flesh, play only a limited role in education. Research shows that the
human brain accepts new concepts largely through constant recall while
interacting socially. This suggests that good teaching must “de-emphasise
lecture and emphasise active problem-solving,” says Carl Wieman, a winner of
the Nobel prize in physics and an adviser to Barack Obama.
To KhanAcademy’s fans, the flip
that Mr Khan advocates helps to do just that. As a tool, KhanAcademy
individualizes teaching and makes it interactive and fun. Maths “is social now,”
says Kami Thordarson, as the 10-year-olds in the 5th-grade class she teaches at
Santa Rita Elementary School huddle round their laptops to solve arithmetic
problems as though they were trading baseball cards or marbles.
The system has its detractors.
First, it may not be much use beyond “numerate” subjects such as maths and the
sciences; KhanAcademy does have a few history offerings, but they are less
convincing than the huge number of maths and science ones. Second, even in
these subjects Khan Academy implicitly reinforces the “sit-and-get” philosophy
of teaching, thinks Frank Noschese, a high-school physics teacher in New York.
That is, it still “teaches to the test”, without necessarily engaging pupils
more deeply. Worse, says Mr Noschese, KhanAcademy’s deliberate “gamification”
of learning—all those cute and addictive “meteorite badges”—may have the
“disastrous consequence” of making pupils mechanically repeat lower-level
exercises to win awards, rather than formulating questions and applying
concepts.
The teachers now using
KhanAcademy counter that it is meant to be merely one, not the only, teaching
tool, and that by freeing up class time it also makes possible other projects
that do exactly what Mr Noschese promotes. In the fifth-grade class at Santa Rita,
the children have made a tile floor (requiring fancy maths to estimate sizes,
shapes and numbers). When this correspondent visited, they practised on
KhanAcademy but then played SKUNK, a game involving probability.
America’s standardized tests are
now “easy, a floor, not of interest”, says Ms Thordarson. She feels that the
tool thus allows her to teach better and go deeper. But “You have to be more
creative and more flexible, which is challenging,” she says. It’s not for
teachers who “want to turn a page in a book”, adds Kelly Rafferty, the
co-teacher. They thereby answer one common misconception about KhanAcademy:
that it makes live teachers less relevant. Mr Khan, the teachers and Mr Gates
all insist that the opposite is the case. It can liberate a good teacher to
become even better. Of course, it can also make it easy for a bad teacher to
cop out.
The value of teachers
The arrival of a powerful new
tool thus does not replace the other necessary element in education reform, the
raising of teacher quality. Good teaching is the single biggest variable in
educating pupils, bigger than class size, family background or school funding,
says Eric Hanushek, an education expert at Stanford University’s Hoover
Institution. And crucial to having better teachers is evaluating them properly,
hiring, firing and promoting on merit.
The teachers’ unions, however,
are fighting all attempts to move away from systems in which pay and tenure are
linked only to seniority and credentials. In some places, such as Washington, DC,
the reformers have won a few skirmishes; in others, such as Los Angeles, the
unions are digging in for a long war. The core question is how, even whether,
teachers can be evaluated fairly on the basis of exam results or classroom
observation (given that some pupils are from educated families, others from
poor areas, and so on). The unions are doing their best to ensure that
evaluations have no consequences in staffing.
Technology can play a part here,
because, in essence, evaluation is an information problem. Today’s standardised
tests are deservedly unpopular with teachers and parents because, first, the
“standards” tend to be low (and easily lowered further); second, teaching to
the test is a form of dumbing down; and third, the tests take place only once
or twice a year.
By contrast, spend a few minutes
playing with the KhanAcademy dashboard of a class in Los Altos, and you see a
vision of the future. You can follow the progress of each child—where she
started, how she progressed, where she got stuck and “unstuck” (as Ms
Thordarson likes to put it). You can also view the progress of the entire
class. And you could aggregate the information of all the classes taught by one
teacher, of an entire school or even district, with data covering a whole year.
Dennis van Roekel, the president
of the National Education Association (NEA), the largest labour union in
America with 3.2m members, goes ballistic at this suggestion. “Don’t demean the
profession” by implying that you can rate teachers with numbers, he says.
Besides, this sort of thing would introduce destructive competition into a
culture that should be collaborative, he adds (without explaining why
data-driven evaluations have not destroyed collaboration in other industries).
The NEA and its supporters will
eventually lose this fight, says Kate Walsh, the president of the National
Council on Teacher Quality, a think-tank that unions love to hate. “It will be
considered fair game to collect the data” and to use them to get better
teachers in America’s classrooms, she says. It may or may not be KhanAcademy’s
software that produces this information. Nonetheless, the academy, “by offering
a different model, is forcing the issue that people have speculated about”,
says Mr Hanushek at Stanford. “These technological ideas offer the possibility
of breaking a logjam.”
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