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This situation has presented an incredible opportunity to flip the education paradigm around and we are missing it. In my opinion, there are two different oppor

This situation has presented an incredible opportunity to flip the education paradigm around and we are missing it. In my opinion, there are two different opportunities that should be explored: 1. Using the "best" teachers from the school district to provide lectures for every student taking that course while the other teachers provide TA-esque support to the students in their "section." If a student is struggling with homework or to understand the lecture, they can go into a video breakout room and get 1:1 support without interrupting others. 2. Education has been focused on in-person lectures with home "work" for decades. Given the current situation, it seems to make the most sense to provide offline/prerecorded lectures and to use the class time to support the students with direct help for their work. Students can listen to a lecture without a live teacher, they cannot ask questions about their work without one. Are their holes in both of these? Sure. Are they as bad as just moving the existing paradigm online? I don't think so.

ryanchants 7y ago
From my personal experience, I do great when I can sit in a classroom and absorb what's being presented. You put the lecturer behind a screen, live or pre-recorded, and I lose most of my ability to stay on track.
- zarkov99 7y ago
  Does the equation change if you get the best teacher in the world via video vs just an average teacher live?
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    For me the answer is “no”. I can’t do video learning without getting distracted quickly.
    - tamaharbor 7y ago
      And then Judge Judy comes on the TV...
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    Can't speak for the poster, but for myself it's much easier to pay attention and be present when I have a bit of a push through the simple desire to appear engaged. Otherwise it's easier to zone out.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - zarkov99 7y ago
      Do you think that perhaps that issue might be alleviated if the lecture is intertwined with interactive quizzes, models, examples, things like that?
      - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
        Possibly? My grades slipped in university once I realized that no one knew my name and no one much cared. Really it's about the interaction with my teacher and the desire to keep from disappointing.
      - ardy42 7y ago
        Could you replace your dog with videos of the best dog in the world along with integrated Tamagotchi-style interactive components [1]? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamagotchi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamagotchi
        zarkov99 7y ago
        I expected different things from my dog and my teacher when I was a kid. I still do today. Many of my teachers, most even, could have been replaced, with with some gain, by high-quality videos and quizzes.
        intended 7y ago
        I think the point being raised is not about the expectations of a dog and a of a teacher. The point is between a simulacrum of a dog, and an actual living breathing dog with its own wants/needs/spontaneous behavior and personality. Similarly, the expectations of an actual teacher, vs just self learning with tests. This issue is captured in Blooms 2 sigma problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
  - asdff 7y ago
    It doesn't matter for me. In class I'm engaged with my professors. Over zoom I can't seem to get the words to stick in my brain. I have no idea why. I really try to stay engaged in zoom but somehow I can't. It's not just class too. I forget what I talked about in meetings with colleagues. I talked to people from class and my coworkers about this, and I'm far from alone with these feelings and a lack of focus on zoom. Something to do with the cadence of speech, lack of body language maybe, maybe something deeper and more primal. I thought I would love working from home, now I'm itching to get back just so I can function again.
  - threatofrain 7y ago
    I don't know the difference between the world's best and very good, but Khan Academy is very good and teachers have already been turning their students onto it as supplemental education. We always had the ability to throw kids onto Khan Academy.
  - ardy42 7y ago
    > Does the equation change if you get the best teacher in the world via video vs just an average teacher live? That's a really weird way of thinking about it. You're completely ignoring the relational aspect of learning and focusing exclusively on the artifact of a particular presentation of some content. You also seems to be assuming that everyone learns the same way without variation. Commodification and mass production are improvements in a lot of areas, but not all. I don't think you can rank the teachers of the world from best to worst, when often the best teacher is a good-enough one that understands you.
    - zarkov99 7y ago
      Well, sure, I guess. I suppose a great teacher can be a positive influence beyond academics in some ineffable ways. However, as far my kids are concerned, my wife and I can provide the positive influence and the teacher can handle the academics. And that aspect of the teachers job is much more quantifiable and there are definitely people who are much better than others at it.
  - eitally 7y ago
    No,because in order for it to make a difference the student needs to be in a mental state for it to make said difference. It's just too hard for many kids to get motivated to self-teach, especially with no practical experience.
- eightysixfour 7y ago
  In this situation we are forced to use distance learning, I’m not saying these ideas should carry over to “normal” times, only that the situation presents an incredible opportunity for testing other methods.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  This (plus at least one other here, so it's not really "just you") makes me wonder if you/some people who find this problematic have an issue like central auditory processing disorder. People with CAPD are often dependent to a high degree on lip reading and video feed may disrupt the connection between words and mouth movements just enough to inject too much noise into the signal. If you don't realize this is what you are doing, you can't readily compensate when it gets disrupted.
- rorykoehler 7y ago
  I'm the opposite but that is largely irrelevant. First I'm a fully grown adult with intrinsic motivation. Second school should be more about socialising and hands-on learning which you can't do over Zoom. Though he isn't in school yet I'm very worried about the psychological stress this lockdown is causing my 2 year old. He is definitely not as "free" in his outside world interactions anymore. I hope this is temporary and we can reverse it through gradual rolling back of the restrictions.
Waterluvian 7y ago
I'm incredibly skeptical that successful people don't just marginalize those who struggle in school when suggesting what's best. Their brains can't help but perceive the issue based on their own experience.
- eightysixfour 7y ago
  And I'm sure I do that in some ways (although I struggled in school out of a mixture of boredom at a younger age and not knowing how to study by the time I got to college), but how does option #1 not improve the experience by providing more direct support for those struggling? Can't keep up with the lecture? Ask your group teacher to breakout and support you.
  - Waterluvian 7y ago
    Sure, let's talk it out together. So I think that #1 may as well be, "pay the best teachers extra to record their lectures and have them for years to come." Universities do this. It's worthwhile. We should probably do that! But I'm not sure it replaces anything that exists (I'm not sure you argued this!). A core reason we have teachers and not a TV screen is because they can organically read the room and adjust the lesson plan in real time. That feedback loop is constantly ongoing even if you never noticed it. I don't want to jump too far through the experiment but I think the conclusion is the same: any good idea is really just, "we need to do more." So if the argument is that we can do more with the same resources, I fear it's because we fail to grok what those resources are actually doing today.
    - eightysixfour 7y ago
      This assumes I meant the lecture should be prerecorded, I actually thought more of it being live. It presents other issues as other posters have mentioned, such as catching back up after sidebars, but provides the live feedback that increases engagement,
  - snazz 7y ago
    I think the problem is that most kids don’t really care about the material—if they are not understanding it, they’ll do something else during the lecture instead of asking for help. Struggling but trying hard is far more indicative of success than easily passing tests without studying, in my opinion.
zarkov99 7y ago
I agree 100%. I think after say 1st grade, most schools are enormously inefficient, their main value is providing free day care and (somewhat) supervised socialization opportunities. The actual academic work is easily done at home with little supervision.
- asdff 7y ago
  A huge thing with elementary schools is fitness. For some kids, gym class is the only time they are physically active. I went to a private middle school that had a rule that you needed to play a sport, even if it meant just being a benchwarmer. Only the football players were chubby at that school.
  - zarkov99 7y ago
    Where I live they let home-school kids participate in public school teams. My friends who home-schooled their kids told me that was the best of both worlds.
    - Talanes 7y ago
      Much more structured than my home-school PE. I would just roller-blade and bike around town, because I had a single mother who couldn't waste time driving me around to see friends. She would just approximate my distance into a PE journal and that was that.
TheHegemon 7y ago
This may work for older people but my experience is that for kids that would be next to useless. Most of the time spent is just trying to keep the kids on task not actually spent trying to teach.
- dpflan 7y ago
  Perhaps it can start in high school. I completely agree that there is a developmental caveat here that makes the approach a no-go for younger students.
  - dpflan 7y ago
    Maybe the model can scale with high schoolers helping with younger students. Remote montessori?
    - asdff 7y ago
      Between homework, sports, and working nights, high school me would be hard pressed to find the time to be a chegg tutor for the school district.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y ago
  >Most of the time spent is just trying to keep the kids on task not actually spent trying to teach. Citation needed
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y ago
  Why do you believe, or what evidence do you have, for elementary educators spending most of their time keeping children on task? I have asked elementary teachers about this trope and pleasantly surprised to learn that most students do not require constant redirection. Likewise, their classes not much different from higher level classes excepting for the rigor of the subject matter. So, I'd love to read any evidence you have for your statement in case these teachers and their schools were an exception instead of the norm.
jbreiding 7y ago
Charter schools seem like the best opportunity to vet this style/evolution of education. There are sure to be holes, like does this lead to treating the in person teacher as a commodity and reducing the value of that in person time? But definitely this is a time for disruption in this space.
- asdff 7y ago
  Large public districts have many magnet programs that can experiment here too. Some of the issues with the magnet program are getting people to the school. 10 miles in LA could take you an hour during rush hours. A high school program that combined distance work with going to campus only a couple days out of the week would be very beneficial and mirror a college environment better than anything else. I have reservations about fully remote programs, because in my newly remote grad program right now I am worthless with zoom only lectures, and I'm not alone.
kilroy_jones 7y ago
Younger students (K-12) need interaction with other students and their teachers, not lectures. I teach some of the most motivated and diligent students you could ask for, but after 3 weeks of online learning they were burnt out. To further compound the issue, in many places students don't have reliable internet access or a decent computer.
- bubbleRefuge 7y ago
  Yes, its tough enough to get them to concentrate with all of the electronic stimulants available, and now we are forcing them to spend more time on these electronic platforms. For young people, we need to stimulate their curiosity. They need to see , touch, feel, and experience things in multiple dimensions. They have all this curiosity and energy and we squash it by expecting them to sit and listen to lectures and do worksheets. Experiential learning was falling by the wayside before this crisis, and now that is accelerating. Living in the 3rd largest school district in America, I'm wondering if secretly ,the administrators are seeing this as an opportunity to get 1 step closer to automating away the teacher so that they can stay within budget constraints and serve more people. Feels like it is all going the wrong way. We need to flip this narrative: massive federal funding for schools, more teachers, better pay for teachers, better facilities, more field trips, small student to teacher ratios, free tutoring.
  - zzedd 7y ago
    yes, there is a long history of trying to automate education (largely unsuccessfully). see Larry Cuban's "Teaching and Machines"
- yay_cloud2 7y ago
  This has been my son's experience as well (Grade 4). We are on week 6 of home-school, and by far the thing that energizes him, lifts his mood, and gets him through his work is any interactions at all with his fellow students. Most of his classmates are too young to have strong bonds outside of the structure of school, so (I think) school needs to accept the power of these bonds and facilitate social interaction between kids. De-prioritize the output, and prioritize the process of learning things together.
tssva 7y ago
What do you do when a significant number of students can't view the video lecture or participate in video breakout rooms for 1:1 support because they lack access to the internet? This isn't just an issue for those of limited financial means. There are areas where internet access is not available for any price or the cost for internet access to support regular viewing of video classroom content would run into the hundreds of dollars per month.
- sjg007 7y ago
  Yeah this is a big problem.
- wolco 7y ago
  You provide them access for free. That how it working locally here.
mikekchar 7y ago
I worked for 5 years as an "assistant language teacher" (ALT) in Japan. The idea is that you have the normal teacher teaching the class and an ALT who assists. At its worst you end up with the teacher lecturing and the ALT reading things out of the textbook. However at its best you have this awesome tag-team where one person is guiding the class and the other is spotting confused faces and fixing problems before they get big. The main problem with this approach is that teachers are generally not used to working cooperatively. They have their "way" and they don't like to deviate from that "way". As odd as it sounds teachers also don't like being observed in the classroom. Teaching is incredibly difficult (by far the most difficult job I've ever attempted to do). The constraints you usually have to work with also mean that failure in at least some forms is inevitable (or to put it another way -- failure is the norm and you take your successes where you can get them). Because of this teachers are often incredibly defensive about how they approach tasks and decisions that they make. As much as I hate it, it is completely usual in my experience that teachers obfuscate what's going on in the classroom. Having other teachers present is really challenging for most teachers that I've encountered. I honestly believe that team teaching is the way to go, but there are a lot of hurdles that you need to deal with before you can get there. The technology is not really the stumbling block. It's much more the social dynamic and the need for realistic and sensitive teacher evaluation methods. With some students you can literally just lock them in a room and they will learn the material. With other students, it doesn't matter how good the teacher is, they will just refuse to learn (for a huge variety of reasons -- medical, physical, psychological, etc... things that no teacher is realistically able to cope with). Quite a few teachers have realised that they can game the system by simply filtering the students by how easy they are to teach. And because teaching is a very stable job with a reasonable income, you are always going to get a fair number of people who are more interested in gaming the system than teaching stuff. And as is usual in large organisations, people who are good at gaming the system and have no interest in the technical side of the job tend to rise to the top of the decision making ranks. It's quite a difficult problem to solve.
wnoise 7y ago
The second is currently done in some places. It's known as an "inverted classroom". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom
clairity 7y ago
your #2 is the inverted classroom that’s been around for decades (if not since at least socrates), most notably with the khan academy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom
underwater 7y ago
A good remote learning solution wouldn't involve teachers lecturing. Teaching is not about merely presenting information to be absorbed. Teaching requires a feedback loop. What does the child need to know? What do they know already? Are they engaged? Can they explore the problem space themselves and get feedback and direction?
jonahbenton 7y ago
With all respect, I used to work in EdTech and had thoughts about Ed exactly like this- before I had 3 kids and got involved in the local public school, sat on the PTA, raised funds, won elected office on the school board and dealt with issues at the policy level. There is some merit to pursuing these ideas at the paradigm level for various kinds of post-secondary level education, and of course it is already happening- though still poorly. Before that level- basically before the age of 25- about 1% of what we call "education" consists of "teaching"- having a source of truth utter statements around the intellectual architecture of various "subjects" that we have constructed and partitioned over the long years of human civilization, with varying levels of inspiration and motivation. That "paradigm" that ideas like these hope to transform- that really is at most only 1% of what education is for the under-25s. What's the 99%? Mimic-ing, copying, replaying, performing, processing, engaging. School is an elaborate community improv performance, staffed at best with performers whose skills are measured in EQ, not IQ. I regularly witness school staff plan the model of their interactions with the kids down to the minute, down to the second- tho just the model. The actual performance is spontaneous. It is theater. Yes, there is a curriculum, and homework, and grades, and so forth. Those are all part of the act. There are no "best" teachers. There are only an uncountable myriad of 1-1 relationships and engagements, each of which represents a full spectrum human interaction possibility (only a fraction of the potential of which of course is ever fulfilled). And though I love "work" and do a lot of it and have my kids do a lot of it- that also is just performative. The goal isn't to complete the assignments in an intellectual progression. No. It is in service of developing behavioral- awareness of self- and emotional- empathetic, sympathetic, awareness of others- tools to engage in the world. Not to put too high a gloss on it, but in digital terms an orchestrated ChatRoulette is a closer approximation to what actually happens in an education context than the Yale lectures and homework helper. And there is simply no substitute for the all too real, full spectrum chemistry that develops when people are in physical space together. So changing the digital teaching paradigm is essentially meaningless. And "remote learning" is about the worst oxymoron. The best thing we can do at a policy level is provide financial liquidity so that parents can afford to devote their full attention to their children, while we are in this phase where that is required.
kaitai 7y ago
I taught master's courses in a mathematical topic for five years, running in-person and online courses in parallel. Online learners in my course were highly motivated, paying a sh&*-ton of money for a degree that could vault them into a higher-paying job. They all had a bachelors degree in a STEM subject. Online learners still performed measurably worse in the course than in-person learners. We have the "best" teachers already providing materials: they're in books. You can go read Kolmogorov's probability books, you can read the Feynman lectures on physics. You can even listen to the Great Courses and learn whatever the bleep you want there. And do you? Do even adults have, as a group, the discipline, attention, and stamina to self-teach like this? No. I call it self-teaching for a reason. When I taught, I looked into students' eyes and on their papers. I walked around the room. I had them present on the board. I prodded them to discuss ideas and argue with each other. I made mistakes writing proofs or calculations on the board and made students catch them, even -- yes, this is a skill math profs practice, because it's inevitable and recovering from the fall with grace is a learned skill! Every class in person was an interactive intellectual wrestling match. Video is just not the same. Interrupting others with your questions and discussion is vital to learning. I'm so glad I'm no longer in the classroom, frankly. Sigh.
- mbrameld 7y ago
  Were those online classes purely asynchronous or was there a teleconference some number of times per week? I wonder if the difference in performance is due to accountability. It's easy to slack off when you don't have to look the teacher in the eyes and explain why you didn't do what you were supposed to do.
- kayoone 7y ago
  Interesting, but why are you glad it’s over? Too intense?
  - kaitai 7y ago
    A couple reasons: with the probable decline in numbers of students (particularly international students) I see furloughs and firings in the future at my former university. Pay cuts and furloughs are coming in my industry as well, but because the base pay is higher, there is farther to fall -- and I mean that in a good way, because I'm still living as if I made half my salary. But more than that, the part I actually liked about teaching was that person-to-person engagement. The arguments, the exploring, the discovery. Seeing people (students) rise to challenges and do things they didn't think they could do. I've done a lot of online teaching, and certainly some of that can happen, but especially with struggling students -- they just don't log on. They slip away. At least if someone's sitting in your classroom you can provoke them or cajole them or charm them into a reaction that you can tease into engagement.
themodelplumber 7y ago
Hard to take advantage of opportunities when you are treading water. Teachers have met with incredibly frustrating wall after wall, trying to apply tech, trying to adapt to new conditions in which parents are giving their kids unlimited vacation, yet they are expected to keep a spreadsheet of contacts with children... There's a lot of uphill here right up front. The main upside is that when people can finally take a breather at the end of this, I'm sure that at _that_ point more people can realistically regroup and be creative moving forward.
hysan 7y ago
FYI, the second suggestion you list is flipping the classroom and some teachers already do this. The first option is something that does happen in multi-teacher classrooms (in my experience teaching in Japan; unsure about the US). As for holes - Without thinking too deeply, the main issues I see with breakout sessions and student support in an online environment are: 1. Not being able to see how students are working and struggling requires that students themselves be proactive in seeking help. However, not all schools push students to behave this way nor are all students capable of realizing when they are stuck or going too far down the wrong path. 2. Lower income students are automatically ruled out and/or have a far less optimal experience. The longer remote learning runs with this type of divide, the larger the education gap becomes. I agree. A huge chance is being missed. However, this opportunity has been missed for a long time already. The pandemic is just making this painfully obvious now.
adelHBN 7y ago
---"Using the "best" teachers from the school district to provide lectures for every student taking that course" While theoretically this sounds good, it doesn't work in practice. Kids, espcially young ones (I have a 2nd grader), need that personal interaction with their teacher. Schools are already overwhelmed with the teacher to student ratio. Imporsonalizing this interaction will only worsen an already bad situation.
- wolco 7y ago
  Wouldn't they get familiar with their new online teachers pretty quickly? Local teachers would provide the personal interaction during work periods where kids come online and get help. Grade 2 and younger are already learning through tv. Big Bird is rarely in person but kids know and learn from him. Is Barney still around? The Wiggles? Those top performs seem to hold attention as well as the local puppet show.
cylinder 7y ago
why are you people trying to end everything that's in-person? what is so harmful about in person activities?! there's an ugly anti-humanist component in the tech world.
- kube-system 7y ago
  I don’t think it’s anti-humanist as much as it is simply a result of perspective. Ask a preacher to solve a problem and they’ll use prayer. Ask a politician to solve a problem and they’ll draft a law. Ask a developer to solve a problem and they’ll write you an app.
sailfast 7y ago
This doesn't work for a young child on their own (think grade school) but it might (intriguing model that I haven't seen yet) work with smaller groups of kids learning together - say, all the first graders on your block at somebody's house with limited exposure to others. That said, all of this still requires a fully engaged adult in the room to monitor interactions and help things stay on track and answer questions. My wife plans a full curriculum for all our kids together each day with breakout sessions for grade-appropriate subjects. This has been basically interrupted by the current official video curriculum of our school system - and our system is doing better than most on this subject. I have the luxury of an adult available to teach most of the day. Many do not. But I still want to yank my kids out of official "school" and get homeschooling certified until this ends. It burns you out. I'd welcome the schools closing officially now, and offering optional assignments to pass the time for parents that want to use them but that's not really equitable, it just works best for me. A video conference is great but it can't help keep a virtual classroom engaged and flow with the kids' questions as well as an in-person room. There just isn't enough bandwidth. Experience: currently three gradeschool and younger in my house.
- eitally 7y ago
  This is my experience, too, and I don't have an fully engaged adult able to help. The kids can obviously move 2-5x faster than they do during normal school, but doing so absolutely requires an engaged adult. There are just too many things an elementary aged kid doesn't have experience with yet for them to be able to solve their own problems (or stay focused). My 5th grader got reprimanded today for spending 30min on fonts & colors on an essay that itself only took 30min... as a simple example. Another example: I regularly have to prevent both kids from accessing Youtube during school time.
- abetterday 7y ago
  Totally. We were making massive amounts of progress on our own and virtual school curriculum mostly gets in the way. We've largely stopped going to the video sessions and are just doing some of the school work on top of our own. Thankfully the teacher has been accommodating / letting it go so far and the school work itself has been minor.
gedy 7y ago
> Using the "best" teachers from the school district to provide lectures I'm sure teacher's union would be loath to try new things like this or "rank" teachers in any way..
- prawn 7y ago
  You can probably phrase this as "teachers would be" and make the same, realistic point without attracting as much ire? It was my first thought too. Another option would be to have a rotation.
- karatestomp 7y ago
  Ranking attempts tend to go bad and become hellish and/or are abused to get rid of people for personal or political reasons while bypassing normal processes and protections against firing. I mean, software developers love stack ranking, right? We can go ahead and fire anyone who doesn't close X Jira tickets per month, I'm sure. Lines of code? Business impact? (oh, sorry, that critical bugfix you did doesn't fit in our measurement framework so you're underperforming, have a PIP). "Wait but we can just measure performance with tests" LOL OK, if you thought "teaching to the test" was bad before... And anyway they do already measure performance with year-over-year student progress on state tests, and there are consequences if you suck at it for too long. At least around here. There's enough leeway that it's not horrible but it's also not great and does encourage some of those teach-to-the-test behaviors that people claim to hate. A good teacher would 100% for sure teach better not being judged under that system, and it's one of many things that push them out of teaching—even if they do fine on the metrics, it contributes to frustration and job dissatisfaction, having to do less-than-optimal things or else stress about test scores[1]. A bad one, perhaps, is better for being so judged. [1] Example: several of these kids are effectively two grade levels behind on [subject]. Do I try to fill in those gaps, and leave them with little understanding of the material that will be on this year's test and so nearly certain to miss every question, or do I treat of the earlier material only when absolutely necessary so they see most of this year's stuff (even if understanding it poorly), so score a little higher than they would otherwise? The former is definitely better for the students, but if you get a "low" class you're (the teacher) gonna be fucked on your standardized testing scores if you do that. This is a real, and not uncommon, situation to be in.
eitally 7y ago
per your #1, my school district is doing that. One designated teacher [per grade, per subject] is recording lectures that are posted to a central repository. this content is assigned out, along with supplementary work, via Google Classroom at the class level. Each class teacher, then, schedules their own class video meetings to "check-in" and offer support for students who need it. My experience thus far, having 3rd and 5th graders at home, is that remote math learning is a piece of cake and the quarantine experience has really illuminated for me how slowly public schools move. It has also clearly demonstrated that teacher language arts & writing requires 1) skills I don't have, and 2) direct interaction with a competent instructor. Note, too, that not all teachers have adequate internet access at home to effectively teach remotely. My 5th grader's teacher is quite rural and has 5mbps down, 1mbps up internet service. She can barely participate in online meetings and cannot effectively upload any video content. #2: 100% agree, but some classes lend themselves this more readily than others.
sopooneo 7y ago
I taught in Boston for five years. Something that almost no one outside the profession seems to understand is that a teacher's number one function is to inspire students to work. For the vast majority of students, that requires physical proximity to their teacher. If all it took was the best lecturers, we could have been doing perfect distance learning since 1982 via UPS and VHS.
watwut 7y ago
Having kids now and being a kid, both are wrong. Education is not in-person lectures with work from home and were not for decades. And having best teacher making video may end up with bad video while not having your best teacher in contact with any kids. And it is not like passive watching videos would be something new in education either.
briandear 7y ago
Doesn’t work particularly well with early primary school kids though. Interactivity is a big part of learning and that’s close to impossible remotely. The flipped classroom concept itself is nothing new. My issue is with the “remote” part of that. There is value in kids working on an art project together or working in small groups to create a poster presentation, etc. The lecture-homework paradigm might be appropriate for high school, to for younger grades, there really aren’t lectures as much as interactive discussions and hands-on exploration.
vl 7y ago
One thing for sure this pandemics is going to demonstrate us if there is any value in American school education.
e12e 7y ago
Schools is about keeping kids and adolescents out of trouble, and free up parents to work. Ideally they also help with development and socialization, and as a bonus - might teach something. This is very different from colleges - that generally actually focus on teaching stuff (which means students do all the important work themselves). All the important roles of primary school are hard to accommodate via remote setup.
fizixer 7y ago
I can't believe no one is talking about MOOCs and how MOOCs are part of our daily lives and yet they have been absolutely toothless in taking over the system. I personally think MOOC-with-tech-advancements is the future of education. And I have a suspicion brick-and-mortar educational system has played a role in crippling its progress.
musicale 7y ago
I've this "inverted classroom" approach work well, although it can have problems also; if the course isn't self-paced (which I think is much better) you have to make really sure that students aren't overloaded with video lectures, because it's easy to "fall behind." It can't be an excuse for instructors to cram more stuff into an already packed course. Some other things I've seen and experienced that have seemed to work well and that I'd like to see more of: - course staff who serve primarily as advisors and guides to provide and help students find, discover and use resources for self-directed learning and to help when students encounter difficulties - schools that helped students buy cheap paperback books for recreational reading - scaled out peer tutoring, where the school pays students who have taken a course to tutor students who are currently taking the course - self-paced learning without harsh penalties for "falling behind" other students or an arbitrary course schedule

ryanchants 7y ago

From my personal experience, I do great when I can sit in a classroom and absorb what's being presented. You put the lecturer behind a screen, live or pre-recorded, and I lose most of my ability to stay on track.

zarkov99 7y ago
Does the equation change if you get the best teacher in the world via video vs just an average teacher live?
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  For me the answer is “no”. I can’t do video learning without getting distracted quickly.
  - tamaharbor 7y ago
    And then Judge Judy comes on the TV...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  Can't speak for the poster, but for myself it's much easier to pay attention and be present when I have a bit of a push through the simple desire to appear engaged. Otherwise it's easier to zone out.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - zarkov99 7y ago
    Do you think that perhaps that issue might be alleviated if the lecture is intertwined with interactive quizzes, models, examples, things like that?
    - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      Possibly? My grades slipped in university once I realized that no one knew my name and no one much cared. Really it's about the interaction with my teacher and the desire to keep from disappointing.
    - ardy42 7y ago
      Could you replace your dog with videos of the best dog in the world along with integrated Tamagotchi-style interactive components [1]? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamagotchi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamagotchi
      - zarkov99 7y ago
        I expected different things from my dog and my teacher when I was a kid. I still do today. Many of my teachers, most even, could have been replaced, with with some gain, by high-quality videos and quizzes.
        intended 7y ago
        I think the point being raised is not about the expectations of a dog and a of a teacher. The point is between a simulacrum of a dog, and an actual living breathing dog with its own wants/needs/spontaneous behavior and personality. Similarly, the expectations of an actual teacher, vs just self learning with tests. This issue is captured in Blooms 2 sigma problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
- asdff 7y ago
  It doesn't matter for me. In class I'm engaged with my professors. Over zoom I can't seem to get the words to stick in my brain. I have no idea why. I really try to stay engaged in zoom but somehow I can't. It's not just class too. I forget what I talked about in meetings with colleagues. I talked to people from class and my coworkers about this, and I'm far from alone with these feelings and a lack of focus on zoom. Something to do with the cadence of speech, lack of body language maybe, maybe something deeper and more primal. I thought I would love working from home, now I'm itching to get back just so I can function again.
- threatofrain 7y ago
  I don't know the difference between the world's best and very good, but Khan Academy is very good and teachers have already been turning their students onto it as supplemental education. We always had the ability to throw kids onto Khan Academy.
- ardy42 7y ago
  > Does the equation change if you get the best teacher in the world via video vs just an average teacher live? That's a really weird way of thinking about it. You're completely ignoring the relational aspect of learning and focusing exclusively on the artifact of a particular presentation of some content. You also seems to be assuming that everyone learns the same way without variation. Commodification and mass production are improvements in a lot of areas, but not all. I don't think you can rank the teachers of the world from best to worst, when often the best teacher is a good-enough one that understands you.
  - zarkov99 7y ago
    Well, sure, I guess. I suppose a great teacher can be a positive influence beyond academics in some ineffable ways. However, as far my kids are concerned, my wife and I can provide the positive influence and the teacher can handle the academics. And that aspect of the teachers job is much more quantifiable and there are definitely people who are much better than others at it.
- eitally 7y ago
  No,because in order for it to make a difference the student needs to be in a mental state for it to make said difference. It's just too hard for many kids to get motivated to self-teach, especially with no practical experience.
eightysixfour 7y ago
In this situation we are forced to use distance learning, I’m not saying these ideas should carry over to “normal” times, only that the situation presents an incredible opportunity for testing other methods.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
This (plus at least one other here, so it's not really "just you") makes me wonder if you/some people who find this problematic have an issue like central auditory processing disorder. People with CAPD are often dependent to a high degree on lip reading and video feed may disrupt the connection between words and mouth movements just enough to inject too much noise into the signal. If you don't realize this is what you are doing, you can't readily compensate when it gets disrupted.
rorykoehler 7y ago
I'm the opposite but that is largely irrelevant. First I'm a fully grown adult with intrinsic motivation. Second school should be more about socialising and hands-on learning which you can't do over Zoom. Though he isn't in school yet I'm very worried about the psychological stress this lockdown is causing my 2 year old. He is definitely not as "free" in his outside world interactions anymore. I hope this is temporary and we can reverse it through gradual rolling back of the restrictions.

Waterluvian 7y ago

I'm incredibly skeptical that successful people don't just marginalize those who struggle in school when suggesting what's best. Their brains can't help but perceive the issue based on their own experience.

eightysixfour 7y ago
And I'm sure I do that in some ways (although I struggled in school out of a mixture of boredom at a younger age and not knowing how to study by the time I got to college), but how does option #1 not improve the experience by providing more direct support for those struggling? Can't keep up with the lecture? Ask your group teacher to breakout and support you.
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  Sure, let's talk it out together. So I think that #1 may as well be, "pay the best teachers extra to record their lectures and have them for years to come." Universities do this. It's worthwhile. We should probably do that! But I'm not sure it replaces anything that exists (I'm not sure you argued this!). A core reason we have teachers and not a TV screen is because they can organically read the room and adjust the lesson plan in real time. That feedback loop is constantly ongoing even if you never noticed it. I don't want to jump too far through the experiment but I think the conclusion is the same: any good idea is really just, "we need to do more." So if the argument is that we can do more with the same resources, I fear it's because we fail to grok what those resources are actually doing today.
  - eightysixfour 7y ago
    This assumes I meant the lecture should be prerecorded, I actually thought more of it being live. It presents other issues as other posters have mentioned, such as catching back up after sidebars, but provides the live feedback that increases engagement,
- snazz 7y ago
  I think the problem is that most kids don’t really care about the material—if they are not understanding it, they’ll do something else during the lecture instead of asking for help. Struggling but trying hard is far more indicative of success than easily passing tests without studying, in my opinion.

zarkov99 7y ago

I agree 100%. I think after say 1st grade, most schools are enormously inefficient, their main value is providing free day care and (somewhat) supervised socialization opportunities. The actual academic work is easily done at home with little supervision.

asdff 7y ago
A huge thing with elementary schools is fitness. For some kids, gym class is the only time they are physically active. I went to a private middle school that had a rule that you needed to play a sport, even if it meant just being a benchwarmer. Only the football players were chubby at that school.
- zarkov99 7y ago
  Where I live they let home-school kids participate in public school teams. My friends who home-schooled their kids told me that was the best of both worlds.
  - Talanes 7y ago
    Much more structured than my home-school PE. I would just roller-blade and bike around town, because I had a single mother who couldn't waste time driving me around to see friends. She would just approximate my distance into a PE journal and that was that.

TheHegemon 7y ago

This may work for older people but my experience is that for kids that would be next to useless. Most of the time spent is just trying to keep the kids on task not actually spent trying to teach.

dpflan 7y ago
Perhaps it can start in high school. I completely agree that there is a developmental caveat here that makes the approach a no-go for younger students.
- dpflan 7y ago
  Maybe the model can scale with high schoolers helping with younger students. Remote montessori?
  - asdff 7y ago
    Between homework, sports, and working nights, high school me would be hard pressed to find the time to be a chegg tutor for the school district.
Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y ago
>Most of the time spent is just trying to keep the kids on task not actually spent trying to teach. Citation needed
Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y ago
Why do you believe, or what evidence do you have, for elementary educators spending most of their time keeping children on task? I have asked elementary teachers about this trope and pleasantly surprised to learn that most students do not require constant redirection. Likewise, their classes not much different from higher level classes excepting for the rigor of the subject matter. So, I'd love to read any evidence you have for your statement in case these teachers and their schools were an exception instead of the norm.

jbreiding 7y ago

Charter schools seem like the best opportunity to vet this style/evolution of education. There are sure to be holes, like does this lead to treating the in person teacher as a commodity and reducing the value of that in person time? But definitely this is a time for disruption in this space.

asdff 7y ago
Large public districts have many magnet programs that can experiment here too. Some of the issues with the magnet program are getting people to the school. 10 miles in LA could take you an hour during rush hours. A high school program that combined distance work with going to campus only a couple days out of the week would be very beneficial and mirror a college environment better than anything else. I have reservations about fully remote programs, because in my newly remote grad program right now I am worthless with zoom only lectures, and I'm not alone.

kilroy_jones 7y ago

Younger students (K-12) need interaction with other students and their teachers, not lectures. I teach some of the most motivated and diligent students you could ask for, but after 3 weeks of online learning they were burnt out. To further compound the issue, in many places students don't have reliable internet access or a decent computer.

bubbleRefuge 7y ago
Yes, its tough enough to get them to concentrate with all of the electronic stimulants available, and now we are forcing them to spend more time on these electronic platforms. For young people, we need to stimulate their curiosity. They need to see , touch, feel, and experience things in multiple dimensions. They have all this curiosity and energy and we squash it by expecting them to sit and listen to lectures and do worksheets. Experiential learning was falling by the wayside before this crisis, and now that is accelerating. Living in the 3rd largest school district in America, I'm wondering if secretly ,the administrators are seeing this as an opportunity to get 1 step closer to automating away the teacher so that they can stay within budget constraints and serve more people. Feels like it is all going the wrong way. We need to flip this narrative: massive federal funding for schools, more teachers, better pay for teachers, better facilities, more field trips, small student to teacher ratios, free tutoring.
- zzedd 7y ago
  yes, there is a long history of trying to automate education (largely unsuccessfully). see Larry Cuban's "Teaching and Machines"
yay_cloud2 7y ago
This has been my son's experience as well (Grade 4). We are on week 6 of home-school, and by far the thing that energizes him, lifts his mood, and gets him through his work is any interactions at all with his fellow students. Most of his classmates are too young to have strong bonds outside of the structure of school, so (I think) school needs to accept the power of these bonds and facilitate social interaction between kids. De-prioritize the output, and prioritize the process of learning things together.

tssva 7y ago

What do you do when a significant number of students can't view the video lecture or participate in video breakout rooms for 1:1 support because they lack access to the internet? This isn't just an issue for those of limited financial means. There are areas where internet access is not available for any price or the cost for internet access to support regular viewing of video classroom content would run into the hundreds of dollars per month.

sjg007 7y ago
Yeah this is a big problem.
wolco 7y ago
You provide them access for free. That how it working locally here.

mikekchar 7y ago

I worked for 5 years as an "assistant language teacher" (ALT) in Japan. The idea is that you have the normal teacher teaching the class and an ALT who assists. At its worst you end up with the teacher lecturing and the ALT reading things out of the textbook. However at its best you have this awesome tag-team where one person is guiding the class and the other is spotting confused faces and fixing problems before they get big. The main problem with this approach is that teachers are generally not used to working cooperatively. They have their "way" and they don't like to deviate from that "way". As odd as it sounds teachers also don't like being observed in the classroom. Teaching is incredibly difficult (by far the most difficult job I've ever attempted to do). The constraints you usually have to work with also mean that failure in at least some forms is inevitable (or to put it another way -- failure is the norm and you take your successes where you can get them). Because of this teachers are often incredibly defensive about how they approach tasks and decisions that they make. As much as I hate it, it is completely usual in my experience that teachers obfuscate what's going on in the classroom. Having other teachers present is really challenging for most teachers that I've encountered. I honestly believe that team teaching is the way to go, but there are a lot of hurdles that you need to deal with before you can get there. The technology is not really the stumbling block. It's much more the social dynamic and the need for realistic and sensitive teacher evaluation methods. With some students you can literally just lock them in a room and they will learn the material. With other students, it doesn't matter how good the teacher is, they will just refuse to learn (for a huge variety of reasons -- medical, physical, psychological, etc... things that no teacher is realistically able to cope with). Quite a few teachers have realised that they can game the system by simply filtering the students by how easy they are to teach. And because teaching is a very stable job with a reasonable income, you are always going to get a fair number of people who are more interested in gaming the system than teaching stuff. And as is usual in large organisations, people who are good at gaming the system and have no interest in the technical side of the job tend to rise to the top of the decision making ranks. It's quite a difficult problem to solve.

wnoise 7y ago

The second is currently done in some places. It's known as an "inverted classroom". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom

clairity 7y ago

your #2 is the inverted classroom that’s been around for decades (if not since at least socrates), most notably with the khan academy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom

underwater 7y ago

A good remote learning solution wouldn't involve teachers lecturing. Teaching is not about merely presenting information to be absorbed. Teaching requires a feedback loop. What does the child need to know? What do they know already? Are they engaged? Can they explore the problem space themselves and get feedback and direction?

jonahbenton 7y ago

With all respect, I used to work in EdTech and had thoughts about Ed exactly like this- before I had 3 kids and got involved in the local public school, sat on the PTA, raised funds, won elected office on the school board and dealt with issues at the policy level. There is some merit to pursuing these ideas at the paradigm level for various kinds of post-secondary level education, and of course it is already happening- though still poorly. Before that level- basically before the age of 25- about 1% of what we call "education" consists of "teaching"- having a source of truth utter statements around the intellectual architecture of various "subjects" that we have constructed and partitioned over the long years of human civilization, with varying levels of inspiration and motivation. That "paradigm" that ideas like these hope to transform- that really is at most only 1% of what education is for the under-25s. What's the 99%? Mimic-ing, copying, replaying, performing, processing, engaging. School is an elaborate community improv performance, staffed at best with performers whose skills are measured in EQ, not IQ. I regularly witness school staff plan the model of their interactions with the kids down to the minute, down to the second- tho just the model. The actual performance is spontaneous. It is theater. Yes, there is a curriculum, and homework, and grades, and so forth. Those are all part of the act. There are no "best" teachers. There are only an uncountable myriad of 1-1 relationships and engagements, each of which represents a full spectrum human interaction possibility (only a fraction of the potential of which of course is ever fulfilled). And though I love "work" and do a lot of it and have my kids do a lot of it- that also is just performative. The goal isn't to complete the assignments in an intellectual progression. No. It is in service of developing behavioral- awareness of self- and emotional- empathetic, sympathetic, awareness of others- tools to engage in the world. Not to put too high a gloss on it, but in digital terms an orchestrated ChatRoulette is a closer approximation to what actually happens in an education context than the Yale lectures and homework helper. And there is simply no substitute for the all too real, full spectrum chemistry that develops when people are in physical space together. So changing the digital teaching paradigm is essentially meaningless. And "remote learning" is about the worst oxymoron. The best thing we can do at a policy level is provide financial liquidity so that parents can afford to devote their full attention to their children, while we are in this phase where that is required.

kaitai 7y ago

I taught master's courses in a mathematical topic for five years, running in-person and online courses in parallel. Online learners in my course were highly motivated, paying a sh&*-ton of money for a degree that could vault them into a higher-paying job. They all had a bachelors degree in a STEM subject. Online learners still performed measurably worse in the course than in-person learners. We have the "best" teachers already providing materials: they're in books. You can go read Kolmogorov's probability books, you can read the Feynman lectures on physics. You can even listen to the Great Courses and learn whatever the bleep you want there. And do you? Do even adults have, as a group, the discipline, attention, and stamina to self-teach like this? No. I call it self-teaching for a reason. When I taught, I looked into students' eyes and on their papers. I walked around the room. I had them present on the board. I prodded them to discuss ideas and argue with each other. I made mistakes writing proofs or calculations on the board and made students catch them, even -- yes, this is a skill math profs practice, because it's inevitable and recovering from the fall with grace is a learned skill! Every class in person was an interactive intellectual wrestling match. Video is just not the same. Interrupting others with your questions and discussion is vital to learning. I'm so glad I'm no longer in the classroom, frankly. Sigh.

mbrameld 7y ago
Were those online classes purely asynchronous or was there a teleconference some number of times per week? I wonder if the difference in performance is due to accountability. It's easy to slack off when you don't have to look the teacher in the eyes and explain why you didn't do what you were supposed to do.
kayoone 7y ago
Interesting, but why are you glad it’s over? Too intense?
- kaitai 7y ago
  A couple reasons: with the probable decline in numbers of students (particularly international students) I see furloughs and firings in the future at my former university. Pay cuts and furloughs are coming in my industry as well, but because the base pay is higher, there is farther to fall -- and I mean that in a good way, because I'm still living as if I made half my salary. But more than that, the part I actually liked about teaching was that person-to-person engagement. The arguments, the exploring, the discovery. Seeing people (students) rise to challenges and do things they didn't think they could do. I've done a lot of online teaching, and certainly some of that can happen, but especially with struggling students -- they just don't log on. They slip away. At least if someone's sitting in your classroom you can provoke them or cajole them or charm them into a reaction that you can tease into engagement.

themodelplumber 7y ago

Hard to take advantage of opportunities when you are treading water. Teachers have met with incredibly frustrating wall after wall, trying to apply tech, trying to adapt to new conditions in which parents are giving their kids unlimited vacation, yet they are expected to keep a spreadsheet of contacts with children... There's a lot of uphill here right up front. The main upside is that when people can finally take a breather at the end of this, I'm sure that at _that_ point more people can realistically regroup and be creative moving forward.

hysan 7y ago

FYI, the second suggestion you list is flipping the classroom and some teachers already do this. The first option is something that does happen in multi-teacher classrooms (in my experience teaching in Japan; unsure about the US). As for holes - Without thinking too deeply, the main issues I see with breakout sessions and student support in an online environment are: 1. Not being able to see how students are working and struggling requires that students themselves be proactive in seeking help. However, not all schools push students to behave this way nor are all students capable of realizing when they are stuck or going too far down the wrong path. 2. Lower income students are automatically ruled out and/or have a far less optimal experience. The longer remote learning runs with this type of divide, the larger the education gap becomes. I agree. A huge chance is being missed. However, this opportunity has been missed for a long time already. The pandemic is just making this painfully obvious now.

adelHBN 7y ago

---"Using the "best" teachers from the school district to provide lectures for every student taking that course" While theoretically this sounds good, it doesn't work in practice. Kids, espcially young ones (I have a 2nd grader), need that personal interaction with their teacher. Schools are already overwhelmed with the teacher to student ratio. Imporsonalizing this interaction will only worsen an already bad situation.

wolco 7y ago
Wouldn't they get familiar with their new online teachers pretty quickly? Local teachers would provide the personal interaction during work periods where kids come online and get help. Grade 2 and younger are already learning through tv. Big Bird is rarely in person but kids know and learn from him. Is Barney still around? The Wiggles? Those top performs seem to hold attention as well as the local puppet show.

cylinder 7y ago

why are you people trying to end everything that's in-person? what is so harmful about in person activities?! there's an ugly anti-humanist component in the tech world.

kube-system 7y ago
I don’t think it’s anti-humanist as much as it is simply a result of perspective. Ask a preacher to solve a problem and they’ll use prayer. Ask a politician to solve a problem and they’ll draft a law. Ask a developer to solve a problem and they’ll write you an app.

sailfast 7y ago

This doesn't work for a young child on their own (think grade school) but it might (intriguing model that I haven't seen yet) work with smaller groups of kids learning together - say, all the first graders on your block at somebody's house with limited exposure to others. That said, all of this still requires a fully engaged adult in the room to monitor interactions and help things stay on track and answer questions. My wife plans a full curriculum for all our kids together each day with breakout sessions for grade-appropriate subjects. This has been basically interrupted by the current official video curriculum of our school system - and our system is doing better than most on this subject. I have the luxury of an adult available to teach most of the day. Many do not. But I still want to yank my kids out of official "school" and get homeschooling certified until this ends. It burns you out. I'd welcome the schools closing officially now, and offering optional assignments to pass the time for parents that want to use them but that's not really equitable, it just works best for me. A video conference is great but it can't help keep a virtual classroom engaged and flow with the kids' questions as well as an in-person room. There just isn't enough bandwidth. Experience: currently three gradeschool and younger in my house.

eitally 7y ago
This is my experience, too, and I don't have an fully engaged adult able to help. The kids can obviously move 2-5x faster than they do during normal school, but doing so absolutely requires an engaged adult. There are just too many things an elementary aged kid doesn't have experience with yet for them to be able to solve their own problems (or stay focused). My 5th grader got reprimanded today for spending 30min on fonts & colors on an essay that itself only took 30min... as a simple example. Another example: I regularly have to prevent both kids from accessing Youtube during school time.
abetterday 7y ago
Totally. We were making massive amounts of progress on our own and virtual school curriculum mostly gets in the way. We've largely stopped going to the video sessions and are just doing some of the school work on top of our own. Thankfully the teacher has been accommodating / letting it go so far and the school work itself has been minor.

gedy 7y ago

> Using the "best" teachers from the school district to provide lectures I'm sure teacher's union would be loath to try new things like this or "rank" teachers in any way..

prawn 7y ago
You can probably phrase this as "teachers would be" and make the same, realistic point without attracting as much ire? It was my first thought too. Another option would be to have a rotation.
karatestomp 7y ago
Ranking attempts tend to go bad and become hellish and/or are abused to get rid of people for personal or political reasons while bypassing normal processes and protections against firing. I mean, software developers love stack ranking, right? We can go ahead and fire anyone who doesn't close X Jira tickets per month, I'm sure. Lines of code? Business impact? (oh, sorry, that critical bugfix you did doesn't fit in our measurement framework so you're underperforming, have a PIP). "Wait but we can just measure performance with tests" LOL OK, if you thought "teaching to the test" was bad before... And anyway they do already measure performance with year-over-year student progress on state tests, and there are consequences if you suck at it for too long. At least around here. There's enough leeway that it's not horrible but it's also not great and does encourage some of those teach-to-the-test behaviors that people claim to hate. A good teacher would 100% for sure teach better not being judged under that system, and it's one of many things that push them out of teaching—even if they do fine on the metrics, it contributes to frustration and job dissatisfaction, having to do less-than-optimal things or else stress about test scores[1]. A bad one, perhaps, is better for being so judged. [1] Example: several of these kids are effectively two grade levels behind on [subject]. Do I try to fill in those gaps, and leave them with little understanding of the material that will be on this year's test and so nearly certain to miss every question, or do I treat of the earlier material only when absolutely necessary so they see most of this year's stuff (even if understanding it poorly), so score a little higher than they would otherwise? The former is definitely better for the students, but if you get a "low" class you're (the teacher) gonna be fucked on your standardized testing scores if you do that. This is a real, and not uncommon, situation to be in.

eitally 7y ago

per your #1, my school district is doing that. One designated teacher [per grade, per subject] is recording lectures that are posted to a central repository. this content is assigned out, along with supplementary work, via Google Classroom at the class level. Each class teacher, then, schedules their own class video meetings to "check-in" and offer support for students who need it. My experience thus far, having 3rd and 5th graders at home, is that remote math learning is a piece of cake and the quarantine experience has really illuminated for me how slowly public schools move. It has also clearly demonstrated that teacher language arts & writing requires 1) skills I don't have, and 2) direct interaction with a competent instructor. Note, too, that not all teachers have adequate internet access at home to effectively teach remotely. My 5th grader's teacher is quite rural and has 5mbps down, 1mbps up internet service. She can barely participate in online meetings and cannot effectively upload any video content. #2: 100% agree, but some classes lend themselves this more readily than others.

sopooneo 7y ago

I taught in Boston for five years. Something that almost no one outside the profession seems to understand is that a teacher's number one function is to inspire students to work. For the vast majority of students, that requires physical proximity to their teacher. If all it took was the best lecturers, we could have been doing perfect distance learning since 1982 via UPS and VHS.

watwut 7y ago

Having kids now and being a kid, both are wrong. Education is not in-person lectures with work from home and were not for decades. And having best teacher making video may end up with bad video while not having your best teacher in contact with any kids. And it is not like passive watching videos would be something new in education either.

briandear 7y ago

Doesn’t work particularly well with early primary school kids though. Interactivity is a big part of learning and that’s close to impossible remotely. The flipped classroom concept itself is nothing new. My issue is with the “remote” part of that. There is value in kids working on an art project together or working in small groups to create a poster presentation, etc. The lecture-homework paradigm might be appropriate for high school, to for younger grades, there really aren’t lectures as much as interactive discussions and hands-on exploration.

vl 7y ago

One thing for sure this pandemics is going to demonstrate us if there is any value in American school education.

e12e 7y ago

Schools is about keeping kids and adolescents out of trouble, and free up parents to work. Ideally they also help with development and socialization, and as a bonus - might teach something. This is very different from colleges - that generally actually focus on teaching stuff (which means students do all the important work themselves). All the important roles of primary school are hard to accommodate via remote setup.

fizixer 7y ago

I can't believe no one is talking about MOOCs and how MOOCs are part of our daily lives and yet they have been absolutely toothless in taking over the system. I personally think MOOC-with-tech-advancements is the future of education. And I have a suspicion brick-and-mortar educational system has played a role in crippling its progress.

musicale 7y ago

I've this "inverted classroom" approach work well, although it can have problems also; if the course isn't self-paced (which I think is much better) you have to make really sure that students aren't overloaded with video lectures, because it's easy to "fall behind." It can't be an excuse for instructors to cram more stuff into an already packed course. Some other things I've seen and experienced that have seemed to work well and that I'd like to see more of: - course staff who serve primarily as advisors and guides to provide and help students find, discover and use resources for self-directed learning and to help when students encounter difficulties - schools that helped students buy cheap paperback books for recreational reading - scaled out peer tutoring, where the school pays students who have taken a course to tutor students who are currently taking the course - self-paced learning without harsh penalties for "falling behind" other students or an arbitrary course schedule