One World Schoolhouse notes

One World Schoolhouse (Education Reimagined), Salman Khan (founder of Khan Academy).

• "Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time." -- Rabindranath Tagore.
• his early tutoring precepts: lessons should be paced to the individual student's needs, not to some arbitrary calendar; and that basic concepts needed to be deeply understood if students were to succeed at mastering more advanced ones.
• First videos: ten minutes was the right length. 
• Having established that students' attention maxed out at around 10 or 15 minutes, they still regarded it as a given that classroom sessions lasted an hour. 
• Mastery Learning: students should adequately comprehend a given concept before being expected to understand a more advanced one. 
• Carelton Washburne and the Winnetka Plan (1922) - a mastery learning curriculum.
• Mastery learning structured its curriculum not in terms of time, but in terms of certain target levels of comprehension and achievement. 
• In Washburne's system, students, with the help of self-paced exercises, proceed at varying rates toward the same level of mastery. 
• In a traditional academic model, the time allotted to learn something is fixed while the comprehension of the concept is variable. Washburne was advocating the opposite. What should be fixed is a high level of comprehension ans what should be variable is the amount of time students have to understand a concept. 
• Taking responsibility for education is education; taking responsibility for learning is learning. From the student's perspective, only by taking responsibility does true learning become possible. 
• Personal responsibility is not only undervalued but actually discouraged by the standard classroom model. 
• Standard classroom model: stressing passivity over activity; failure to maximize the brain's capacity for association learning -- achieving the deeper comprehension and more durable memory by relating something newly learned to something already known. 
• In other words, it's easier to understand and remember something if we can relate it to something else we already know. 
• 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. 
• Artificial separation of traditional academic subjects. Need to learn the connections among subjects. 
• In my view, no subject is ever finished. No subject is sealed off from other concepts. Knowledge is continuous; ideas flow. 
• Encourage students to adopt an active stance toward their education. Active learning, owned learning, giving them the freedom to determine where and when the learning will occur. 
• Portability and self-pacing. Easy and on-going access to lessons that have come before. 
• Fresh look at basic assumptions about teaching and learning. Ask simple but crucial questions of what works, what doesn't work, and why. 
• Prussian model: system tended to stifle deeper inquiry and independent thought. 
• You have to allow students to explore the subject on their own. Today's world needs a workforce of creative, curious, and self-directed lifelong learners who are capable of conceiving and implementing novel ideas. 
• Need to adopt a more questioning and skeptical stance. 
• Schools measure out their efforts in increments of time rather in target levels of mastery. 
• Getting a 95. Not a cause for rest or celebration, should have been given a review of the 5 percent missed. Once a certain level of proficiency is obtained, learner should attempt to teach the subject to other students. Keep revisiting the core ideas through the lenses of different, active experences. 
• Hitting a wall. Most students hit it with Calculus and organic chemistry (in pre-med). 
• Because calculus is a synthesis of much that has gone before. It assumes complete mastery of algebra and trigonometry. 
• Failure to relate classroom topics to their eventual application in the real world. Those x's and y's can stand for an infinitely diverse set of phenomena and ideas. 
• Need to  get to this deeper, functional understanding, which takes time. But most students just see algebra as one more hurdle to be passed, a class rather than a gateway. 
• Creativity: creativity in general tends to be egregiously underappreciated and often selected against in our schools. Also, many educators fail to see math, science, and engineering as "creative" fields at all. 
• Homework becomes necessary because the broadcast, one-pace-fits-lecture--the very heart of our standard classroom model -- turns out to be a highly inefficient way to teach and learn. 
• Flipping the classroom -- lecture at home, homework  in class. Lectures done independently at a student's pace; problem-solving in class. 
• This kind of education available to everyone. With the use of enlightened use of technology. The promise of technology is to liberate teachers so they have more time for human interactions. 
• 10 answers right in a row. Signal of mastery? true conceptual understanding? 
• Learning by doing. Learning by having productive, mind-expanding fun. Summer camps built with emphasis on real projects that would in turn illustrate  underlying principles. 
• Best tools are built when there is open, respectful, two-way conversation between those who make the tools and those who use them. 
• about the Future: the certainty of change, coupled with the complete uncertainty as to the precise nature of the change ... What we teach is less important than how they learn to teach themselves. 
• the crucial task of education is to teach kids how to learn. To lead them to want to learn. To nurture curiosity, to encourage wonder, and to instill confidence. 
• Khan at MIT: the idea was to work effectively, naturally, and independently. Could people actually learn twice as much as was generally expected of them? 
• Khan's vision: school of the future should be built around an updated version of the one-room schoolhouse. Kids of different ages should mix. Multiteacher classrooms. 
• Why coaches are liked better than teachers: coaches are specifically and explicitly on the student's side. 
• What happens in the classroom is but preparation for real competition in the outside world. 
• Khan videos one to two hours a school day and peer tutoring. Rest of the time, students need the latitude to follow their own oblique, nonstandard paths. 
• Computer-based, self-paced mastery learning can solve many of the problems that summer vacation creates. 
• Testing: Tests tend to measure quantities of info (and sometimes knowledge) rather than quality of minds -- not to mention character. Test scores seldom identify truly notable ability. 
• I would eliminate letter grades. I would alter content of tests from year to year, incorporate an open-ended design component. It gives us a picture not just of a test-taker, but a learner. 
• Track the ability and willingness to help others. 
• Ideas of education: 1. teaching and learning; 2. socialization; 3. credentialing. Use microcredentials. Greatly help those who don't attend name-brand school. 
• What college could be like: Very basic disconnect between most students' expectations fro college -- a means to employment first and a good intellectual experience second -- and what universities believe their value is -- an intellectual and social experience first, with only secondary consideration to employment. 
• (Meaningful) internships far more valuable -- to student and employer. Rather than taking notes in lecture halls, these students will be actively learning through real-world intellectual projects. Make sure internships are challenging and intellectual; that they support a student's development. 
• Make Time for Creativity: Nearly everything about our current system rewards passivity and conformity and discourage differences and fresh thinking. 
• His imagined school -- more creativity would emerge because it would be allowed to emerge and because there would be time for this to happen. 
• Length of traditional school is a brake on creativity and the artificial chopping up of time into lessons. There should be no brick walls between one "subject" and the next. 
• No magic formula to make kids more creative; rather, it's a way to give light and space and time to the creativity that already exists in each of us.