Yahoo! Throws Schools a Curve

Will virtual teaching replace classroom teaching?

This week, in Austin, at SXSW, the eponymous Music-cum-everything-Festival, edupreneurs are presenting, attending, and probably drinking-a-lot-at seminars.  (I hyphenated that last bit so it would work as a noun in the series.  I don’t think it worked.  But that’s such a good way to attend an education seminar.  I’ve heard.) At one of these seminars at SXSW, the founders of virtual classroom biz standouts InstaEDU, Udemy, and Course Hero will be discussing the future of online education.  These companies are all vying for the opportunity to shape the future of how—and where—students learn.

There’s a lot of excitement (and fear) in schools about the future use of technology in education.  The impact of innovation could (and, I think, most definitely will) dramatically change our national school landscape.  Union reps, politicians, property owners and—always last and always least—teachers are all very interested how the virtual classroom will continue to improve or diminish instruction.

SXSW.edu, as the Fest is called, comes one week after Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer announced that there would be no more telecommuting at her company—and it set the blogosphere aflutter.  Her claim, basically:  distance working ain’t working out so good.  So, naturally, I wondered about the serendipity of it all. Can online classrooms—teleteaching/telelearning—replace the classroom, brick and mortar stuff, that teachers have been doing since Socrates?  If Mayer thinks that Yahoo!’s productivity is a victim of distance-working, might she also think that school’s productivity will also suffer with distance-teaching? 

Teleteaching and Telelearning:  The State of the Art

SXSW.edu, sponsored and backed by Bill and Melinda Gates (which means something politically, for those of you keep track), will be exploring how technology is already impacting pedagogy.  The seminars this week include a particular focus on what I call “teleteaching:” when teachers record lessons or lectures and distribute them online. Teachers have been offering online education for years, of course, but teleteaching seems poised to become a real competitor to “in the classroom” teaching.

Last year, Stanford University professor Daphne Koller got a lot of press when she rolled out Coursera.org at TEDGlobal 2012. The site offers “online course enrollment” in MOOC's from places like Standford, Harvard, and Yale—if you’ve ever heard of such places. You can get credit from these schools without ever going into any classroom at all—a big deal given some of those university names.  Coursera’s website boasts all kinds of wonderful things, mostly the democratization of education.  That’s a good thing.  But do students learn? 

Colleges, high schools, and elementary schools across the country have been expanding their online campuses for years, of course—but rarely as a complete replacement of actual classroom experience.  A couple of years ago, TED shined a spotlight on online teleteaching pioneer Kahn Academy (another Gates beneficiary). At Kahn, students download specific lessons on things such as Algebra, History, and Chemistry. Kahn seems to be working towards the supplemental rather than replacement model.  It has been collaborating with schools across the country, helping teachers “flip” the classroom: the students teach themselves at home with the online instruction then come to the classroom for practice and specific instruction from the actual teacher.  This is right up my alley-- and I have spent some time on Kahn's website.  The model looks pretty good and where I'd put my money for where things are headed.

But does the online instruction work?  The University of Phoenix has long been the butt of many jokes—but it’s been there for years, offering online courses. People get degrees from there and, I suppose, opportunities and raises from the accreditation.  It ain’t Harvard, but a degree is a degree.  But let’s get to the nitty gritty:  do people learn from a virtual instructor?  A couple of years ago, I took an online driving course to lower my car insurance.  Did it make me a better driver?  Heck, I don’t know. 

For years, the internet has been offering free education on places like YouTube and eHow. Many of my students are teaching themselves using online courses of all sorts, learning everything from how to play songs or do dance steps to how to write a better analytical essay.  I have seen students teach themselves ukulele on YouTube.  I’ve taught myself how to chop vegetables, install lights, and how to order grilled meat in Rio during Carnival. So the argument for online video instruction certainly has a foothold in the practical world. 

The Virtual Classroom Is Here To Stay

The lingering question in EVERY conversation about innovation in education is: does this stuff work?  The problem is that there isn’t enough data that we can reliably crunch to lean one way or the other.  But it doesn’t matter.  Like so many other changes in education made in the last 20-30 years (the ubiquity of standardized tests, the use of teacher evaluations, experiments with the length of a class period), it doesn’t matter if it works.  It only matters if people (politicians, school boards, customers, etc) buy into it.

And that’s why this is just more evidence that edupreneurship is the future of education.  Teachers need to think like entrepreneurs because the market forces simply win the day.  As a supporter of public education, it’s a tricky reality to get my head around.  But teachers MUST be on the ground floor of innovations like virtual instruction.  We need to be making the content, testing techniques and strategies, and adapting our models for online consumption.

Will Yahoo!’s Mayer be seen as a visionary for her call for a return to the workplace?  In the end, I think not.  She’s trying to tighten a ship and send a signal to her company—but I’m sure that Yahoo! will still retain a strong telecommuting model.  The future will have us working everywhere, connected online.  Heck, that’s the way it is now.

Online education is a natural extension of the Socratic model:  students learn best when they are exploring things and teaching themselves. Socrates famously used questions. Today, and especially tomorrow, we’ll most certainly be asking most of our questions online.

My hope? That good teachers will be the ones running the sites, making the videos, and managing the process.

 Citations:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/margiewarrell/2013/02/27/get-to-the-office-or-get-out-why-marissa-mayer-has-made-a-smart-move/

http://www.sxswedu.com/

http://blog.ted.com/2012/07/18/completely-free-online-classes-coursera-org-now-offering-courses-from-14-top-colleges/

America's Got Talent

Exxon Knows Teachers

I’ll bet you’ve seen the Exxon Mobil commercials that are about teachers.  On standardized math and science tests, according to the commercials, students in the US are faring poorly against those from other countries.  In the New York television market, I saw the spot at least a dozen times in November and December.

Pretty amazing, really:  good advertising IS education. 

By almost any measure, American public schooling is in trouble.

We need better teachers—almost everyone agrees on this point.  How to get and keep great teachers, however, remains a sticky wicket.  And—it’s the single most important problem plaguing education.

Exxon’s point appears to be that we need better training for teachers.  Apparently, they've put some money into doing it, too, which is commendable, even if you're not crazy about that company.  Again, a lot of people seem to agree about that—I certainly do.  I have a lot of experience in teacher training:  I've been through graduate programs, seminars, professional development, staff meetings... I've seen what people in my profession are doing to train us.  It is not good.  I hate to say it but, if you're a teacher reading my blog, you know what I'm saying.  Every once in a while, you actually learn something in PD.  But most of the time, it is dismal parody of itself.  It's bad teaching about good teaching.  It'd be funny it weren't so bloody sad or frustrating.

The Billion Dollar Question

How do you train a teacher into being a great teacher?

My answer is simple:  you can’t, basically.  Or, at least, it takes a really motivated person to do it.  I talk about it in detail in an earlier article "The Great Ones" which you should read right now.  Go ahead, I'll wait here.

You can help a lousy teacher become less lousy. With a lot of work, you can take a decent teacher and make them better, certainly.  But you can’t-- without an incredible amount of work in a culture that is really hard to build-- make any old person a great teacher.   It’s like thinking you can take the bassist of any band and make him into Paul McCartney.  Or taking a decent pitcher from a team in the majors and make him into Babe Ruth.  It's incredibly difficult to make someone great at anything. 

So where are all of the great teachers?  Some of them are in the classrooms.  But I’m willing to bet there are many, many more who aren’t teachers by trade.  They’re making money doing something else.

The bottom line:  we don’t have a skill problem.  We have a talent problem.  Exxon Mobil, I'm glad you want to help out teachers.  You guys over at your company know how to attract talent, right?  I'm not trying to be cute or anything, but it's not complicated.  

Mostly, it's just expensive.  

School Yourself

The biggest obstacle isn't a reality:  it's a dream

Here's the old model, the time-tested, incredibly persistent concept of "school:"
The teacher teaches the student.

It's simple, easy to understand, and has the ring of truth.  We say things like "he taught me so much!" or "I learned so much from her."  The teacher is a vending machine, a talking textbook, a knowledge dispenser. We keep the wisdom and dole it out.

As a teacher, I can tell you:  this model works-- less than half of the time.  The days it works are sublime:  you lecture, digress, and expound. Your students sit in the glow of your brilliance, they eat it up, light bulbs go on, and the music of instruction plays like a street fiddler in the square.  You make the magic.

But when that ain't working for you, when the students are bored, lost, or detached-- these are awful teacher moments.   Your students loll in the harsh light of your artificial sun, they list in their seats, darkness pervades, and the clatter of the lecture plays like a rusty chain on the pavement.

The "Great Teacher" Fantasy
Often, teachers of teachers claim to want to debunk this model.  The better part of professional development that I have seen in the last 10 years as a teacher seems to be grounded in the idea that the teacher should not be the "Sage On the Stage."  I swear, I hear that stuff all the time in staff meetings.  It kills me because I don't think anyone really belives it.  When we talk about a great teacher, we often talk about this brilliant genius around whom the classroom orbits. I loved Dead Poets Society and Stand and Deliver.  To some extent, I dreamed of being those guys when I started my career.

This old model is the problem, of course.  It's those dream days of magic teaching that encumber and bewitch us.  We calculate success in the classroom as a measure of the proximity to this idealistic model.  The perfect becomes the enemy to everything else.

Teachers and schools haven't invented this old blanket, however.  It's deep in our collective thought about learning.  We live in a Guru culture.  We celebrate the "amazing teachers" in movies and in books.  Parents "are the most important teachers" of their children.  Older siblings "teach" their younger siblings.  We've even created our computer models around it.  Data is "downloaded" from an original source.  It's "copied." Knowledge is not created-- it's ctrl C then ctrl V.  Real artificial intelligence remains the provence of science fiction because we don't put a high premium on the efficacy of anyone teaching herself.  Once computers are built to teach themselves, it'll be a whole new movie, baby.  But we don't really know how to do that-- because we don't do much of it with each other.

That awesome teacher moment-- that's what we crave.  But it simply doesn't happen often enough-- even for the great teachers.

There's a more effective model, of course: a model that is, arguably, even more recognizable. It's a model that has founded just about every bit of learning ever done by any one.  It's hidden under the old model, nearly unsung in our public discourse about education despite its ubiquity in "real life" applications.

The Better Model
Student teaches himself knowledge.
Teacher helps when and where necessary.

First time parents have no teachers.  Brain surgeons must hold the scalpels alone on a first surgery.  Nobody could teach Mick Jagger how to sing, Warren Buffet how to invest, Oprah Winfrey how to produce, Michael Phelps how to swim, or you how to do whatever it is YOU are good at.  Of course, people helped Mick and Warren and Oprah and the rest-- but no one taught them-- at least, not in the traditional sense.  They taught themselves.  Their mentors were there when and/or where needed.  As have been all the great teachers in your life.

Heck, you taught yourself language.  How to walk.  Do you ever think about how your brain must work for that to have happened?  For it to happen to everyone, everywhere, in every culture around the world?

This old model needs a real challenge, especially as our cultural and political conversations about good teaching begin to gain more and more traction. It's blotting out the light and our schools-- and our culture-- continues to whither under its shiny promise of the "better teacher."

When on the job, the best teachers are barely there.  They elegantly and efficiently drop in and out of the learning process.  They pay attention, make it about the students, and constantly convince/inspire/trick students into teaching themselves.

In a world of Teaching Specialists, we need teachers need to be Specialists in How Teach Oneself.  We need teachers who teach people to not need teachers.

Complicated, indeed.