Why Don’t We Experiment With Khan Academy In Our MATCH Tutoring?
Posted: March 16th, 2011 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 3 Comments »
1. This video is Salman Khan giving a 20-minute talk.
My friend Ann sent this along — I think she saw it live last week in California at TEd.
He calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script — give students video lectures to watch at home, and do “homework” in the classroom with the teacher available to help.
MATCH does a version of “flipping the script.” With tutoring. Rather than thinking of the tutor purely for “help,” we think of the tutor as the personal trainer.
A personal trainer gets people who want to exercise theoretically, but often want to avoid exercise in the moment, to actually do it. After which they’re glad they exercised.
Similarly, a MATCH tutor gets kids who want to learn theoretically — but often want to avoid actually doing math problems, writing essays, and reading texts in the moment — to actually do it. After which they’re (sometimes) glad they worked hard and learned.
2. So: Why doesn’t MATCH School use Khan Academy (and similar) within our very tight tutorial structure?
Think about it.
From a MATCH kid’s point of view, each day she has 2 hours of tutoring: one tutor, her, another kid. Typically hour of math, hour of English.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’ve learned my lesson. Frequently when technology is deployed in schools, it utterly utterly fails.
Most No Excuses charter schools don’t put kids in front of computers that much — whether it’s online or CD-Rom software. Many of the top charter schools have played with this, and haven’t found a lot of value. Kate and I have learned, while planning our elementary school, that some top No Excuses charters have chopped off the 30 to 40 minutes per day where they used to have kids using literacy software.
Even among the tiny handful of “hybrid” charter schools — which get a decent amount of philanthropy — their staff will tell you (off the record) that their own data/observations seems to show that the online tutoring is pretty rocky. It seems cool to technophile observers, but it often functions more as a way to keep kids occupied (teacher costs down) than to really drive learning.
So I get it. Our own teacher experience at MATCH is pretty much no technology integration effort has ever been sticky.
3. With that said, our tutorial structure is a perfect lab to use technology-driven tutorial.
We have a high-structure, high-accountability, no-Facebook-or-you-have-detention, almost impossible to use the computer to goof-off world. We have nice laptops already owned by tutors.
For example, math tutorial. Kids are learning slope of line.
Imagine Kid 1 working pencil and paper on practice problems with tutor, while Kid 2 watches this video.
Then flip: Kid 2 works pencil and paper, while Kid 1 watches the next video in the sequence (more about Slope).
Or both kids watch Khan at same time, then practice, then Khan, then practice.
Tutor could stop video at any point, take questions, talk thing through, clarify.
From a tutor’s point of view, Khan means you get tutor “over the top” of someone else’s explanation, focusing immediately on the stuff kids didn’t understand. You don’t have to make up examples off top of your head. Khan already spent hours on one day thinking of possible examples, then chose ONE example which he thought worked well.
Or tutor could be checking Kid 1 and Kid 2 homework, or other tasks, while they watch Khan.
4. Roll-out.
We figure out how to make this work with the “easy to educate” kids, self-directed. Experiment on 10% of tutorial pairs we think can easily handle this, won’t try to goof around.
Once we get it right, roll to next 10% of “easy-to-educate” kids.
Obviously, anyone who can’t handle it, we just default back to our old-fashioned 2-on-1, all pencil and paper scenario. I.e., there’s a simple, easy to operate “fallback.”
This is EXACTLY where we want to go with the tutorials in Newark in the fall. Focusing on this:
” You don’t have to make up examples off top of your head.”
We want to push on whether we can use technology to serve up tutorial content that is leveled right at the kid in the tutorial, rather than the average kid.
Glad to hear you think it can be done inside of MATCH’s culture.
How do you guys use tutorials for your highest achieving and/or self-motivated kids?
“Khan already spent hours on one day thinking of possible examples, then chose ONE example which he thought worked well.” I think you’ve summed up the essence of the benefit these videos would provide: leveraging those hours’ worth of effort for use in a just a few minutes of tutorial time.
On your more general point of being wary of computer use, I completely agree. The one computer application I’ve found to be consistently beneficial is the type of flashcard program based on spaced repetition. I’ve used four of them (Anki, Supermemo, Mnemosyne [which is free] and Genius), and while I have my own preference, they are pretty amazing, in terms of both the results and minimizing the time spent per day on going over the flashcards. An effective routine, even on multiple topics (e.g., multiplication tables, vocabulary, foreign language) generally takes no more than 5 minutes per day per kid, although the first session may take upwards of 10-15 minutes, as the student enters the front and back information (if its not on a pre-made set, like multiplication or Spanish vocabulary), and the computer learns how well the student knows each answer (in some programs, based on response time, in others, based on self-assigned grades). The programs then keep track of which ones the kids need work on, and (in theory, but also in my experience) serve them up just the subset that they need to work on that day to get it into long-term memory.
Some kids get a corollary benefit from seeing their self-rating on a “tough” card improve over time, as it goes from “I had no idea” (a score of 1 or 2–the card will come up again in the next day or two), through “I got it but it took a long time” (a score of 3–the card will come up again in a few days to a week) to “I get it right immediately” (a score of 5–the card won’t come up for a few weeks). This can make the next new “hard” card seem less daunting, given that they know that all of the old “hard” cards became easy through a relatively predictable process.
Granted, memorization is only one small part of any student’s program, but it can be helpful to memorize certain types of information, and this is pretty effective with a small time investment. In a sense, it’s distilling the time the programmers spent creating the algorithm into the 5 minutes the kids need to go over their cards. This kind of leverage is one of the areas where computers can provide us something we wouldn’t be able to do ourselves (there are paper-card based systems that use spaced repetition, but this would take an enormous amount of time and organization), which seems to me should be the requirement for using computers for learning.
Sorry to go on at length about these programs, but I’ve been meaning to ask if you’ve used anything like this at MATCH, and your general comments on computer use in no-excuses schools made this seem like the right time to ask.