The One World Schoolhouse
Think you might want to read this book?
The One World Schoolhouse by Salman Khan emphasizes the need for innovation within education. A hedge fund analyst with no formal educational training, Khan has completely disrupted the educational landscape. By making videos on Youtube for his cousin, a struggling math student, he quickly developed a following who found his online instruction helpful. Years later, Khan Academy is offering courses in much more than just math and more than 100 million people use the site each year. If you are curious about Khan’s philosophy of education and his vision for the future, this book will inspire you to change education on a grand scale. After all, the Mission of Khan Academy is to provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.
What Would Socrates Ask?
What tenets from Khan Academy fit into our beliefs about teaching and learning?
What if course topics were chosen by the students themselves?
Is the right model for learning group work at school and independent work at home?
What is natural and fair about students choosing when they want to be assessed?
What is already available online that could be useful to your students?
What if some courses in a school were mastery-based and others linked to traditional curriculum?
How do concepts such as “final exams” hinder our hopes that children will become lifelong learners?
What if we also measured what the student was soon ready to do?
Why is it that policies regarding homework tend to focus on duration and grade level instead of the quality of what is being assigned?
What if students could progress in their learning at their own pace in each and every subject?
What if the annual science curriculum was a self-paced, passion-based exploration of “Space, Land, and Sea”?
What if the annual history curriculum was a self-paced, passion-based, exploration of “Prehistory to Predictions”?
What if all student guidance came from a teaching team instead of individual teachers?
Is the Mastery Transcript Consortium a foundation from which to redesign how we view student learning?
What if all students were encouraged to consider creativity, service, or work as part of their annual growth?
Research
A study was done in 1985 where participants were asked to recall information from different sections of a lecture. The first fifteen minutes was by far the segment of the lecture with the highest recall.
In a 1989 study it was concluded that between 1893 and 1979 that “instructional practice (in public schools) remained about the same.”
Teaching according to “learning styles” has no discernible effect.
Concepts
Well-credentialed educational theorists had long before determined that ten to eighteen minutes was about the limit of students’ attention spans.
“Associative learning”- the achieving of deeper comprehension and more durable memory by relating something newly learned to something already known.
Quotes from the author
The old model is based on pushing students together in age-group batches with one-pace-fits-all curricula and hoping they pick up something along the way.
It’s not about graduation rates and test scores. It’s about what those things mean to the outcome of human lives. It’s about potential realized or squandered, dignity enhanced or denied.
…why do we still insist that the heaviest lifting in teaching and learning should take place in the confines of a classroom and to the impersonal rhythm of bells and buzzers?
...I believe that personal responsibility is not only undervalued but actually discouraged by the standard classroom model, with its enforced passivity and rigid boundaries of curriculum and time. Denied the opportunity to make even the most basic decisions about how and what they will learn, students stop short of full commitment.
The radical portability of Internet-based education allows students to learn in accordance with their own personal rhythms, and therefore most efficiently.
With self-paced learning, by contrast, the tempo is right for every student because it is set by every student.
The idea that college is needed for everyone in order to be productive members of society is only a few decades old.
… creativity in general tends to be egregiously underappreciated and often selected against in our schools… many educators fail to see math, science, and engineering as “creative” fields at all.
It’s a little difficult to imagine what pedagogical purpose is served by having a generation of kids sleepwalk through their preteen and early teenage years.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, kids went home with a lot of crisp new biology and physics textbooks, and ground down a lot of Number 2 pencils working endless problems in introductory algebra, geometry, and especially trigonometry, which was useful for working out the trajectory of missiles.
Conventional curricula don’t only tell students where to start; they tell students where to stop.
Quotes from Others
“... wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands…. School trains children to be employees and consumers.” - John Taylor Gatto
“... if you change the technology but not the method of learning, then you are throwing good money after bad practice…. [The iPad] is not a classroom learning tool unless you restructure the classroom…. The metrics, the methods, the goals and the assessments all need to change.” - Cathy N. Davidson (Duke Professor)
“It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.” - Margaret Mead
Implement tomorrow?
Let’s no longer ask the class a question and then call on a random student; this instills fear in all learners. Why not ask a question and continue to roll out clues and initial steps to a solution until students naturally join in the problem solving?
Organization Working on Answers
Gateways to Further Learning
Referenced books for purchase
The applicability of this book to education is ….
Resources
