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Course: Silicon Schools Fund and Clayton Christensen Institute > Unit 3
Lesson 2: Challenging existing assumptionsNew ways to group students and organize staff
Created by Silicon Schools Fund and Clayton Christensen Institute.
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- pleae proof read the closed captioning on the all of the videos. Not only are many of them incorrect, they also contiain very vulgar possible translations. For instance, Milpitas California was translated into male penis.(2 votes)
- The best way to let the Khan academy staff know if you have found a problem is by reporting it using this URL http://khanacademy.org/reportissue?type=Defect The team can't read all the comments below all 6000 video's :-) You could also become a volunteer and help with subtitling: https://khanacademy.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/202483760-Can-I-dub-your-videos-in-another-language-(7 votes)
- Wow! You guys are right on! This answers the major issue of the "common-core", that learning is not a function of chronological age. It allows students to learn at a pace that "works for them", while setting expectations for mastery. It's a cross between the flexible grouping model of an elementary school I worked in 20 years ago and the mastery model of martial arts schools. This model "meets the students where the are" and does not demand lock-step conformity based on age/grade level. It demands a culture with a strong work ethic, self-motivation and an ability to provide both structure and flexibility. I'm having a hard time thinking through exactly how this can be accomplished in the "real world". Any clues or shall I go on to the next section?(2 votes)
- it's obviously working in the real world where parents have money aka yuppieville but i'm as skeptical as you where theft is rampant in inner cities like chicago for laptops and other tech(2 votes)
- ...the brick and mortar dilemma. Do you use virtual school models? The push for distance learning, tech issues in which personal devices are not created equal, and the constraints of buildings that impede wireless signals. The use of time is paramount. How do credential teachers differ from your para professionals?(2 votes)
- i have one of the slowest speeds offered throughout the usa at 2mb/s and it's plenty of speed to stream one khan academy video or various https://www.coursera.org/ lectures at a time.
for low income folks, i'd suggest making your pupil a priority and downgrading cell phone plans, cable, other luxuries, etc to support your kin.(2 votes)
- Instead of having 1 big room smaller ones couldn't you have wall dividers to separate rooms when you want?(1 vote)
- I think having a large class room with small, half-glass walled conference rooms would be the optimal solution. You maximize the supervision and connectivity of the classroom while minimizing the cacophony of a large, decentralized classroom.(1 vote)
Video transcript
- For our purposes, I
want to offer the idea of holding onto that we
don't need one class size to be fixed across all parts of the day. But that actually could
be a variable concept. - Just think about Summit's
personalized learning time. Their students are working in these rooms where the ratio, if you will, of students to teacher sometimes goes up as high as 50 to one. And yet, because Summit's
culture is so strong, students stay highly engaged throughout and are really doing their
work and staying on task. - And in a district
implementation setting, in a district here in
California called Milpitas, they've used a lab rotational
model where they're sending up to 100 students to different lab spaces where a few adults are
monitoring lots of students, and that allows them to
re-deploy other adults to have much more personal,
smaller learning environments with the students back in their classroom. A second example, a school called Alpha Public Schools in San Jose has actually loaded their class sizes at 34 to one, but they've built
their core schedule where at any one time there's a 50-50 mix, where half the students
are on the computers facing a wall working
mostly independently, and half of the students are working in a small group settings, doing kind of direct instruction with the teacher. So the functional class size is 17 to one, and if you visit them,
you see it actually feels very intimate, and students will tell you, "Oh, I like how small my class sizes are." But my going to 34 to one, they give themselves some
financial flexibility that allows them to actually
be economically stable, even on California's
very low funding rates. - Now, we get that there's
some constraints on your ability to innovate with class size. There are existing
assumptions in communities, there's policies around
class size or line of sight, there's labor provisions that restrict what you're able to do on this. We get all that, and
they're very real barriers to re-thinking class size. - And many of these
policies and restrictions actually come from a very good idea of what they're trying to solve. But the result is that
they actually end up hampering innovation,
people don't have the same freedom to try very different models. And we don't think it's
actually that controversial to suggest it might be
okay for students to spend an hour a day in a
class size of 75 to one, working more independently,
if that results in much smaller class sizes
later, where the teachers and students can really get
them a more personalized and intimate learning experience. And if you're in one of
these constrained settings, you can't obsess about the constraints. People need to be able to say, "Given my constraints, what can I do?" And then lastly, we need
to share those pieces of feedback with the policy
makers at the district and state level because they count on practitioners on the ground
to identify the obstacles, so that they have a shot to try to clear some of those out of the way. - That's exactly right,
and just think about how some of these schools
are using this flexibility around class size to rethink
what they do in a day. Some schools, this isn't radical, or doing whole class time
or whole school time, where it's basically like an assembly. They bring their whole group of students into the gymnasium, or
something like that, and they use the time to
actually really focus on school wide values and
those non-cog skills that we were talking about earlier. - What is it that you're
so passionate about that you wouldn't have
to get paid to do it? How are you unique? How are you, you? What is your passion? - My passion is for art and dance. - Two claps for you. (clapping) - I'm so thankful for everyone today. All right, on the count of
three, "Thankful Thursday." One, two, three. - [All] Thankful Thursday! - [All] We are navigators yes we are. We are navigators going far. We work hard through the day, so at night we rest and play. - Remember the example of us being the world's best astrologers? Our current schools are organized based on the year a student was born and what day of the school year it is, as if we can predict what
the right content is. And Ken Robinson has this great line of, "Why are we so obsessed by student's "date of manufacture?" Instead, if we let students
go at different speeds, the organizing principle
becomes, "Who's ready "for what content when?" And actually, age might
become a lot less relevant. - Two tangible examples
to demonstrate the point. Brian and I were actually recently in a public district school that
has recently implemented blended learning, and
the superintendent was taking us around and said, "See in this classroom
here, we've got second "and third graders working
on the same concept." And as Brian and I roved around, turned out that they were
actually everyone from first all the way up to fourth
graders in the same classroom, and it didn't phase the students one bit. One other example, which is Acton Academy, that we talked about
earlier in Austin, Texas, there, students are actually
in mixed aged groupings for significant parts of the day, and as a result, older
students get to mentor the younger students
at some points in time. In other points, they're
working on the same concept. - And at Education for
Change's new school Epic, they've looked at the
middle school of three years and broken each year down into four parts. So it's essentially just a 12 part journey that students are on. And it's okay that one student might be on level eight, and another
student on level six, even though they're both
technically in their second year at the school. It goes back to that kung fu example we talked about earlier. if you're clear about the levels
that each student needs to get through, and it's
really mastery based, we can think about very different kinds of grouping of ages working
well in the same setting. It's really important to ask ourselves, "Who's the right person
to teach each lesson? "And how are they being
assigned throughout the day?" Essentially, in education speak, what we would call the master schedule. - So as we think about
the staffing question in the context of school re-design, first start with the
student experience that you ideally want, and then ask yourself three important questions. The first one is, "Who
do you need on board?" Basically what types of teachers? The second one is, "How
many of them do you need?" And then the third question is, "How will they be spending their time?" - Now, this can be tricky, I want to acknowledge that, right? This is not about laptops for lay-offs and just replacing teachers, or just using lower cost employees. I'm a teacher, I'm pro-teacher. What we think is really important is that we let the teachers and
the administrators actually work together to look at the schedule and figure out, "How should we be using "our most important resource,
the adults in our buildings, "to best benefit what students need most?" - So the schools that are
innovating in this way, what they're thinking about
is where are the places where students can
really own their learning and work independently, and
where are the places where we need adults to actually intervene, and spend times in small
groups with these students? And then once we've thought about that, and we can start to think about, "Where do we really need to
use our credentialed teachers? "And where could we use
other staff support, "to actually support our
students with whatever they "might be trying to accomplish?" The key thing is to use the
right teacher at the right time to really leverage that expertise, to support all of our students. - At Navigator schools, for example, sometimes para-professionals can run the learning lab time,
and then teachers are allowed to specialize by
subject area expertise. So for their model, they
actually need different numbers of teachers than
they would if they were using a traditional staffing model. - It's also interesting to
see how these schools are using all of the adults
to support learning. So at Summit Public Schools, for example, they actually have the
principal overseeing students in the personalized learning time. And a lot of these schools are rethinking how can we use vice-principals, teaching assistants, special
education instructors, and so forth to jump in and join classes or pull students out for
targeted intervention. So as we move away from
the idea of just having one category of teacher,
to having teachers play different roles, these schools
are thinking about ways to make a professional career
path or ladder for teachers to take Master teacher status, or to have other teachers
come in at the beginning of their career and be mentored some. And even thinking about
compensation systems to reward teachers as they take on new and bigger roles within the school. - So what we're moving
away from is this notion of a teacher by him or herself
in an isolated classroom, to starting to think about team teaching. And at Rocketship Education,
which is a network of blended learning schools
starting to grow around the country, what they've
done is move away from their original model, to start
to actually tear down the walls between their three classrooms, so that they can have
three adults inside a single space with lots of students, and start to leverage their
talents in different ways. So students are rotating
between direct instruction, online work, and small group work, and the teachers are
playing off each other, to figure out where they
need to intervene and when, to get the most for their students. So, I've one pause point
as we think about this, which is that as we start
to just tear down walls and group students and teachers
in big open learning spaces, do we risk just doing the open classroom experiment all over again? How do you think about that? - Right, so those of you who know open classrooms from the 70s, we sort of did this and we
built these giant things. And I think the difference
is that under the open classroom movement, we were still doing direct instruction. We changed the physical space, but we didn't change the teaching style. So if I'm going to lecture
to a group of 25 kids, I actually would rather
have small walls, quiet, and have their undivided attention on me. But if we think of a
different teaching approach and we say, "Well, some students "should be working independently." And then I want to have
a small group over here, and then maybe have one
section where there's going to be a little bit of direct instruction, I actually can't do that
very easily if I have three linear boxes, and
the kids have to go in the hallway and come back and forth. So I think the idea of
new and open classrooms is really interesting,
if we have a different teaching style to go with it. Of course, we still have to think about noise and distractions, and
there may be times when we don't want kids in big open pods. But we honestly don't know yet
exactly what it looks like. We do know that the current
model's not getting us there, which is why I'm such a big believer of people doing some thoughtful
experimentation to try different approaches, and
to ideally try it before you spend all your money
blowing out your walls, because we know that's not
going to be the solution.