One World Schoolhouse - KeynesYouDigIt/Knowledge GitHub Wiki

Mastery

  • Mastery-based learning started with Carleton Washburne in 1919
  • Popular in the 20s and 60s (Bloom & Block), but couldn't overcome inertia due to expense. Technology has sufficiently lowered this barrier.
  • Mastery-based learning requires students to take ownership of their learning
  • Crude heuristics:
    • Instead of "90%", 10 right answers in a row was considered mastery
    • If, over 50 problems, the student at no point got 10 correct in a row, they are "stuck"

Learning

  • Teachers convey information, assist, and inspire- but you always educate yourself
  • Learning makes your neurons grown new connections. The stronger those connections are to other neurons, the more it will be remembered. Forgetting is the weakening or loss of those connections.
  • This is why passive learning fails- it doesn't build the associative connection
  • Short-term to long-term memory is called consolidation, and happens when something has been systematically associated with existing knowledge
  • Splitting something into subjects prevents these associations from developing
  • No concept is sealed off from other concepts
  • Repetition creates and strengthens neural pathways
  • Students need to take an active stance to their learning, which means having some ownership over where and when the learning occurs, as well as the tempo
  • Neuroplasticity decreases with age (learning completely new things), but adults do better with knowledge by association

Education History

  • Humans imitated their parents, usually through play
  • People apprecenticed under masters (still down through PhDs and residencies)
  • Plato and Socrates believed in knowledge qua knowledge, and created the academy
    • Very elitist- for oligarchs
    • Practicality and work were beneath them
  • With the printing press, education could become standardized, but at what cost to the value of teachers?
  • The Prussian model was invented in the 18th century
    • Tax-paid, compulsory, subjects, periods, etc.
    • Was primarily intended as a propaganda tool
    • Isolation from first-hand experiences, no "free and unbridled thinking"
    • Class periods were invented so that a self-motivation to learn would be muted by ceaseless interruptions
    • Not all bad- lifted many into the middle class
    • Instituted in America by Horace Mann
  • In 1892, 10 University presidents developed primary and secondary education
    • 6-18
    • English, Math, Reading every year, Chemistry and Physics at the end of high school
    • Students would go into vocations if they didn't have the aptitude for intellectual work

  • Anything less than 100% understanding makes it difficult to build on that foundation
  • The skills need to be connected to their application

Testing

  • Tests don't say anything about someone's potential to learn a subject or how long it will be retained, only where they might be now
  • Testing doesn't tell us the why of a right answer- a fundamental misunderstanding, frustration, running out of time, memorization, a lucky guess, or momentary carelessness?
  • Tests are partial and selective
  • Tracking students via tests was a way of sorting and limiting in the Prussian system, while claiming to be "scientific" and objective
  • People who aren't doing it the same way are creative by definition- these people aren't captured well by tests
  • Everything significant that's happened in math, science and engineering is creative
    • You don't assess dancers by their flexibility or strength
    • You don't assess writers by their grammar or vocabulary

Flipping

Flipping is a great optimization of the Prussian system, but not a reinvention. It still involves students moving together in age-based cohorts at roughly the same pace.

Economics

Student/teacher ratio isn't as important as student/valuable-time-with-a-teacher ratio. Technology can enable this.

  • Learning styles were officially debunked in 2009

Proposed Model

  • Mixed-age classrooms
  • 70-100 students
  • Team-taught by 3-4 teachers
  • The environment should feel alive- some quiet places, some collaborative spaces
    • Some computer-assisted individual exercises
    • Some group project work
    • Some creative areas
  • Vacations at-will
  • No grades- measure quantitative progress over time, qualitative assessments from instructors, and a portfolio of creative works

Quotes

  • "Told to hammer, they could hammer. Told to screw, they could screw. Told to build a shelf, they were hopeless."

On the academy model:

There is much that is appealing in Plato's and Aristotle's pure approach to learning as a deep search for truth; that is, in fact, the mind-set that I hope to bring to students through my videos. However, there are a couple of serious problems with the model of the Greek academy. The first is that it was elitist- far more so than even today's most exclusive prep schools. The young men who could afford to hang around discussing the good and the true were oligarchs. Their families owned slaves. None of these students really needed to care about how to harvest crops or weave textiles. Real work, even work that was intellectual, was beneath them.

This led to a second, more destructive problem that still exists today. Once the pure search for truth was posited as the highest good, it followed that anything merely useful would be regarded as less good. Practical learning -- learning that might actually help one do a job -- was regarded as somehow dirty. And this prejudice pertained even to practical subjects -- as, for example, finance or statistics -- that are intellectually very rich and challenging.

On splitting up things by subject:

This seems to be how our brains work best at retaining knowledge for the longer term, and it would certainly seem to suggest that the most effective way to teach would be to emphasize the flow of a subject, the chain of associations that relates one concept to the next and across subjects. Unfortunately, however, the standard approach to classroom teaching does just the opposite.

This is most obviously seen in the artificial separation of of traditional academic subjects. We lop them off at the ultimately arbitrary places; we ghettoize them. Genetics is taught in biology while probability is taught in math, even though one is really an application of the other. Physics is a separate class from algebra and calculus despite its being a direct application of them. Chemistry is partitioned off from physics even though they study many of the same phenomena at different levels.