Like it or not, we’re now all living in a world with infinite access to information. Machines are outperforming humans at increasingly complex cognitive tasks and companies will soon require employees to work with both digital and human colleagues on increasingly complex projects. Can the teaching methods and standard classroom setting—one teacher, standing in front of a row of desks, instructing a variety of students the same curriculum—prepare students to do that?
For education researcher Gus Halwani, the traditional classroom setting seems antiquated in the modern world. Halwani spent five years at Harvard and MIT studying how targeted training can change a brain over time before coming to Jacksonville to work as director of the middle school program at Discovery School. Through his research, he found that the standard means of educating kids doesn’t always yield the best results.
“Often, in high-performing or prestigious schools, there’s an emphasis on simple kinds of assessment: testing. Assessment is very important but we have to be thoughtful about how we do it. Just because you’re measuring something doesn’t mean you’re capturing information.”
In other words, grading a high-schooler based on how well she can memorize how long the Hundred Years’ War actually lasted might not offer a true assessment of how well she learns.
As Halwani notes, the underpinnings of the modern education system were designed in the early 20th century to meet the needs of an industrial society: teachers convey standard information at a standard pace, with students taking standardized tests to prove the memorization of those facts. Regardless of whether each student shows mastery or fails, the entire class proceeds to the next standard.
In an effort to move away from this one-size-fits-all approach, Discovery partnered with AltSchool, a San Francisco-based tech company that offers a self-directed learning program wherein individual students can learn at their own pace. Think of it as a more sophisticated version of Netflix’s recommendation algorithm— tailoring instruction to individual students by offering up different content and exercises depending on how well they performed on previous exercises. “A teacher can actually assign different learning experiences to different students,” explains Halwani. “This platform allows students to open their computer and see customized learning playlists, which they can proceed through at their own pace.
”The platform has changed the atmosphere of the classroom setting at Discovery, where rooms often feel more like co-working spaces. “Everyone finds a little nook to work in, be it individually or in small groups,” says Halwani. “Every once in a while, we might corral the group together for a group experience.”
Personalized learning is not a new idea, and its value is well established: 2008 research showed that individually tutored students perform two standard deviations higher (better than 98% of) their traditionally taught peers. A pool of better-educated students is good for the country at large, contributing to a more talented workforce and, by extension, a strong economy. Consulting firm McKinsey & Company estimated that if the U.S. had closed the education achievement gap with better-performing nations, the 2010 GDP could have been 8% to 14%—$1.2 trillion to $2.1 trillion—higher than it actually was.
But better performing schools doesn’t necessarily equate to robots and algorithms. In fact, Halwani argues that teachers (real, human, teachers) are more important than ever. “It’s very easy right now to interpret these trends as if tech is offloading responsibility from the teacher. We have opportunities for the human teacher to be even more involved in the process, and more like a coach or a navigator who helps scaffold the journey.”
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg touted his support in a 2015 post, in which he wrote that “building software that will enable personalized learning for all children is a new and exciting challenge for Facebook,” one that would “free up time for teachers to do what they do best—mentor students.”
Halwani offers one such example of the intersection of digital technology and human assisted learning: a group of students who expressed interest in creating a virtual reality app that would immerse users in their greatest fears. “Of course, I told them that would be a really bad idea,” laughs Halwani. “But it allowed us to open up a dialogue about trauma, and how that affects the human body and it led to their doing their own research about fear.” After working on what Halwani calls an advanced, high school-level research paper, the middle schools students discovered that one of the most common phobias was particularly relevant to those in their age group: a fear of public speaking. Five weeks of self-directed research later, the students, used VR to develop an application that would allow other students to practice giving presentations infront of a (virtual) audience. “We used the same sort of software that professionals use,” notes Halwani. “You can adjust the size of the room, size of the audience, and take the speakers’ heart rates to determine how stressed they are.”
The project ultimately demonstrated exactly what Halwani’s research has shown: that students excel when they can create something, rather than simply memorize and regurgitate information year after year. Even better, he adds, is that they worked with both human teachers and digital technology—as they are likely to do once they’re out of school and in the working world—and they actually enjoyed doing the work. “It’s amazing what kids can do when they are really motivated.”
