Bloom

I need a good critique of Bloom's Taxonomy -- and, oddly, I'm not finding one. Neither Daniel Willingham nor E.D. Hirsch so much as mentions Bloom.

I find people like Tom Loveless pointing out that knowledge is the essential prerequisite of "deeper learning," but I'm pretty sure Loveless is fighting the last war.

In the new war, nobody's denying that students must acquire knowledge.

Instead, acquisition of knowledge is the taken-for-granted. Has to happen, but it's nothing to get excited about. 

In my district, administrators are now using Bloom's Taxonomy to justify flipped classrooms. Because "Knowledge" and "Understanding" are the lowest intellectual skills, they can be acquired at home (or on the bus) via 7-minute lectures on YouTube. Precious class time is thus preserved for  Application, Analysis, and Evaluation.

For anyone who thinks knowledge and understanding are the highest skills, not the lowest, Salman Khan's rationale for the flipped classroom is the problem now.

revenge of the nerds, part 2

This is for all you parents out there who have tried to forced your teenage kids to watch Khan videos to figure out their homework.

revenge of the nerds

Had never heard of this video and am guffawing as I watch. I LOLLed, literally, when I reached the part where one of the math guys says Salman Khan "really ought to do a handwriting video, too."



Karim Kai Ani (Khan Academy: The Hype and the Reality) says Khan replaced the video, but quotes Khan's reaction as: “It’s kind of weird...when people are nitpicking about multiplying negative numbers.”

Question: Why is Salman Khan a rock star?

Seriously.

Because that's what he is. He was the keynote at this year's so-called Celebration of Teaching and Learning, and he was a rock star. They had to post guards outside the room where he gave his workshop to keep the crowds out.

I blame the multi-verse.

Salman Khan on 60 Minutes shortly

7pm Eastern time.

"He built a platform that could completely change education."

I'm taking the other side of that bet.

palisadesk on working with Khan videos in middle school

palisades writes:

I don't see the Khan videos as being any kind of instructional breakthrough, precisely because they are not interactive. As Catherine pointed out, with weaker or less motivated students, the demonstration moves too fast, is often poorly worded, and repetition or replaying a segment does not necessarily help. It is certainly no way for struggling students to learn new material.

Some middle school kids I worked with last year used the Khan videos to review procedures like multiplication of decimals, finding the lowest common denominator, and so on. They dutifully watched, replayed and tried to do the problem along with Salman Khan, but were easily confused and would not, I think, have been very successful without a teacher (me) being present to step in.

As for the "flipped classroom" -- I say hahahahaha. Maybe in well-to-do areas. No school I have worked in in the last 15 years has had more than 15% of students with internet access at home. So much for those "digital natives."

flip

A taped lecture isn't a lecture.

which century is it?

Heard at the "Celebration":

"We have 21st century students, 20th century teachers, and 19th century schools."

This witticism was a special favorite of the empaneled Celebrants, though how exactly a sweeping condemnation of the entire U.S. public school system and its teachers jibes with the theme of Celebration, I don't know. Each time I heard it (we heard it often), I was reminded of Ed's observation, lo these many years ago, that since schools are teaching the 21st century skills, it falls to us, the parents, to teach the 19th century ones. True.

In any event, according to the panelists, the solution to our 3-century mix-up seemed to be, variously, more technology, less content, much less testing, Finnish levels of respect for teachers, accountability for parents, a focus on equity instead of excellence (Finland again), and taxpayer funding of college degrees for teachers. Plus lots and lots of Salman Khan videos for students to watch at home, freeing teachers to do the fun discussions and group projects at school. Whoopee!

I'm sure that will work.

Allison on Khan-love in Minnesota

I'm seeing the same thing as Catherine: schools love khan.

Khan isn't going to teach k-8 kids anything, but schools love it anyway.

a) now they think they don't have to spend money on textbooks for elementary kids (first hand have heard that directly from a curriculum director)

b) now their teachers don't need to know how to do the math, khan will do it for them. (heard that directly from an instructional coach who champions Teach Like a Champion)

I know 2 other elementary teachers who love it because now they can do fun Terc things.

I only know one person who is anti Khan here in the establishment. Her very sane complaint: the man teaches completing the square without even drawing a square. It's nothing but computational and procedural fluency for him. It's the opposite of actual instruction, but now schools will use it and instruct even less.

I'm surprised nobody said one of Khan’s most significant achievements is that he has enormously expanded the world’s access to a master teacher.

Look it up

Have just this moment realized I forgot to post an account of my exchange with the WNET staffer at the "Celebration."

Unfortunately, I'm fresh out of energy.

Boiled down, the encounter began with the WNET person saying Salman Khan should not be "allowed" to teach in New York schools because "he's 19th century."

It ended with the WNET person saying there's no reason for people to memorize things because—and here she held her cell phone aloft—"I can look things up on my phone."

When I said, "Can you look up calculus on your phone?" she made a face.

stop the multiverse, I want to get off

So I was propounding my theory that Something Happened in 1985, a world-jarring event that catapulted us all into a parallel universe where Not Teaching is Teaching and Salman Khan is the man you summon to help you spice up your presentations.

Then a couple of minutes later I came across this: The Accidental Universe: Science's Crisis of Faith by Alan P. Lightman.

Why are we living in a world where Writing to the Point is out of print and Grammar to Enrich & Enhance Writing is in print?

I blame the multiverse.

parallel universe

from the Annals of I read the news today, oh boy:

Stanford Medical School, which allows its students to take lectures online if they want, summoned Mr. Khan to help its faculty spice up their presentations.
Online Learning, Personalized
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: December 4, 2011

I am happy Salman Khan exists. I'm glad he's doing what he's doing; I hope he keeps on doing it. His SAT videos weren't helpful in our case (though I can imagine they would be to many others), and he talks too fast in the one distributive property video I watched for me to use it with my middle school math student (who is now distributing the negative rather well, thank you for asking). I have high hopes for the videos on the American-Chinese Debt Loop, however.

But here's the question.

In what universe is Salman Khan the person you summon to "spice up" a presentation?

Surely not the one I'm living in.

What do students say about 'online learning'?

Last Thursday I was talking to 3 of my students about this and that when the topic of online learning and online courses came up. I don't remember why it came up, but it did.

My campus is keenly interested in online learning. It looks to me as if the college hopes to increase enrollment in online courses substantially, although I don't know this.

In any event, the topic came up, and instantly all three said they hate -- hate, that was the word -- online learning. They didn't just say it; they showed it. Their faces scrunched up the way mine does when I step in dog poop wearing my old Nike Free Run sneakers, the ones with the really deep, really tight, really white rubber cleats I must now attempt to power-wash with the garden hose.

That look, the look of disgust (here it is, modeled using 6 "pseudo-muscles") is meaningful to me because I was once given an extended parent-of-an-autistic-child interview, which took hours to complete, and one of the questions asked was: Does your child display the facial expression of disgust? I vividly recall, to this day, feeling relieved and proud when I realized that Jimmy did indeed have a distinct facial expression of disgust, which came across his features when he saw disgusting things. (Mainly poop, as a matter of fact.)

So last Thursday my students were saying they hate online learning, and their faces were exhibiting disgust.

Where there's smoke there's fire: where 3-out-of-3 students inside one classroom express vocal dislike of online learning, there are more. Many more, no doubt.

Why is no one listening to these kids?

That is a rhetorical question.

No one in the public school establishment ever listens to kids. Their misery in 'traditional' classes is simply assumed, and their future pleasure in flipped classrooms is assumed, too.

what's to like about Khan

from the same article:

Khan Academy, for its part, teamed up last year with the Los Altos, Calif., school district to launch a pilot of the model. In it, students in grades 5-8 use Khan-produced online lectures as part of their math curriculum. The pilot has expanded from 150 students in five classrooms last year to 1,000 students in 40 classrooms this year.

“It’s not just about the kids watching the same lecture the night before. For us, the big piece is having teachers use data to make instructional decisions about their students,” said Alyssa Gallagher, the assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction for the 4,500-student district.

Courtney Cadwell, who teaches 7th grade math at Eagan Junior High School and serves as a math coach to teachers in Los Altos, agreed that the rapid feedback on her students has been the best part of the model. The Khan program allows teachers to track what videos and individual exercises students spend the most time watching and working through, and how long it takes students to correctly solve 10 problems in a row for any given math concept.

Last year, as one of the first teachers in the Los Altos pilot, Ms. Cadwell started all of the students in her remediation class on Addition 1, the most basic Khan unit, and asked them to work through all the units at their own pace while she watched using the program’s data-tracking system.

Students worked through those initial units quickly, but she could see when they hit their “pain points”—sometimes on material covered several grades earlier.

“In order for me to get that kind of understanding of a student, I would have had to sit down one-on-one and work through problems and see a pattern, which I’m happy to do, but it takes a lot of time,” Ms. Caldwell said. “This confirmed my suspicions and allowed me to remediate much more quickly.”

“I was able to identify those learning gaps in real time, whether it was from 3rd or 4th or 5th grade, and I was able to remediate and saw those learning gaps begin to disappear,” Ms. Cadwell said.

Before the start of the pilot, only 23 percent of the 7th grade remediation students were proficient on the state mathematics test, but after the first year, the proficiency rate climbed to more than 40 percent, according to district data.

“The math class that they dreaded became something they really loved,” Ms. Caldwell said.
Lectures Are Homework in Schools Following Khan Academy Lead By Sarah D. Sparks | Published Online: September 27, 2011

This is the aspect of "technology" that strikes me as extremely useful: the possibility of immediate, and reasonably accurate, formative assessment of student learning.

Speaking as a parent and a teacher of college freshmen, I have zero interest in a 'flipped' classroom. I don't think it's going to work, and while I normally avoid making predictions (even in private), in this case I have no qualms:

I PREDICT: The flipped classroom - hot! hot! hot! - is going to be yet another edu-flop taking its place in a 100-year parade of edu-flops. 100 years and counting.

COROLLARY: the flipped classroom is looking to be a big, bold, and brassy flop if everyone piles on before we have any indication whatsoever that a flipped classroom actually works. I.e.: before we have any indication that a) kids will actually watch the videos, and b) if they do watch, whether they actually learn anything.

The assessment question is different, I think. As a teacher (and a parent) I have a near-desperate need for more information on what students know and don't know -- and acquiring that information is easier said than done. I can easily imagine the Khan site (or any similar site) being an enormous help -- so much so, that I'm planning an 'online component' for my course next fall. (Though, again, we'll see whether my students can - or will - manage it. That is a subject for another post.)

Meanwhile C. is taking a physics course in which the teacher seems to have actually made "technology" work, also a subject for a separate post.

Flipping the Classroom: Hot! Hot! Hot!

Susan Kramer watched her packed 10th grade biology class weave through rows of desks, pretending to be proteins and picking up plastic-bead “carbohydrates” and goofy “phosphate” hats as they navigated their “cell.” As they went, they explained how the cell’s interior system works.

It’s the kind of activity her students love....
Lectures Are Homework in Schools Following Khan Academy Lead by Sarah D. Sparks | Education Week | September 27, 2011

10th grade?

Really?

They're 15 years old and they love weaving through rows of desks pretending to be proteins and picking up plastic-bead carbohydrates and goofy phosphate hats as they navigate their cell?

hmmmm...

Granted, Flipping the Classroom is Hot! Hot! Hot!. But still.

Schools find Khan Academy works better than group learning

More schools are trying Khan Academy videos in their classrooms, and initial results look promising.  But when you start with an instructional method that includes lots of time-consuming group work, maybe almost anything else will work better.  Here's how it's going at one school.

In the past, math class at the Summit schools was always hands-on: the class worked on a problem, usually in small groups, sometimes for days at a time. But getting an entire class of ninth graders to master the fundamentals of math was never easy. Without those, the higher-level conceptual exercises were impossible.

They found that Khan Academy did a better job.  Not too surprising to me.

You can read more at Cost of College.

Front page articles on the edtech bandwagon

Fast on the heels of a front page New York Times exposé on how education technology has failed to raise test scores comes a front page Education Week article on the virtues of replacing teacher-centered lessons at school with technology-centered lessons at home.  The technology in question is that of the Khan Academy, whose library of lectures and problem sets is impressive in its vastness but not in its instructional feedback. If you input a wrong answer to a math problem you are told that your answer is wrong, but not why, nor how to fix it. Despite this, the Khan Academy has empowered teachers like 10th grade biology teacher Susan Kramer to skip over direct, structured instruction, and instead to watch her students "weave through rows of desks, pretending to be proteins and picking up plastic-bead 'carbohydrates' and goofy 'phosphate' hats as they navigate their 'cell.'"

To be fair, the Khan Academy (1) hasn't been around that long and (2) is the creation of a former hedge fund manager with degrees in math, computer science, and engineering but not in, say, cognitive science and child development. As such, the Khan Academy hasn't profited from the "over 20 years of research into how students think and learn" that underpins more established educational software programs like Carnegie Mellon's Cognitive Tutor.

So it was a bit disconcerting to find, fast on the heels of the Edweek's Khan Academy article, a front page article in Sunday's New York Times on Cognitive Tutor, and how it, too, has turned out to have no statistically significant impact on test scores. While I'd never had a chance to try it out (unlike the Khan Academy, Cognitive Tutor gates access to demos and charges big bucks instead of nothing at all), I'd heard only good things about it, and J enjoyed soaring through its algebra lessons during middle school. But as soon as I read the Times' description of its pedagogy, its limitations became crystal clear:

When the screen says: “You are saving to buy a bicycle. You have $10, and each day you are able to save $2,” the student must convert the word problem into an algebraic expression. If he is stumped, he can click on the “Hint” button.

“Define a variable for the time from now,” the software advises. Still stumped? Click “Next Hint.”

“Use x to represent the time from now.” Aha. The student types “2x+10.”

A math buff would soar right through this; for anyone else, the hints seem way too much of a crutch. There's no mechanism here for ensuring that you're working things out to the best of your ability before resorting to "hint"---i.e., nothing to stop you from clicking "hint" the moment you're not sure what to do. And what if your answer is almost right: say you forgot to include the initial $10, or let x stand for hours rather than days? As far as I can tell (I've now tried it out a bit), you're either right or wrong, and that's it. The program simply isn't sophisticated enough to highlight exactly what needs adjustment. And there's a very simple reason for this. As I discovered in creating a software  program that highlights grammatical errors in English phrases and sentences, this kind of perspicuous feedback takes a huge amount of coding (of the sort that you don't find in any other language teaching software program, thank you very much). Programming in the analogous feedback for mathematical expressions and equations strikes me as even more prohibitive.

On closer inspection, therefore, Cognitive Tutor seems inevitably to foster--in all but the brightest, most motivated students (the ones most able to basically teach themselves)--far too passive of a learning environment for lasting learning. Indeed, the only truly active learning environment that I've ever seen in any software program for any academic subject is that which a computer programming language platform provides for--what else?--computer programming. Only here does the feedback--the error messages or the unexpected outputs--precisely reflect what you've done wrong.

Will these recent exposés about the limitations of educational technology for subjects other than computer science have any effect whatsoever on the edtech bandwagon?

We might as well ask whether recent cognitive science findings have had any effect on how schools teach "higher level thinking." Or whether mainstreaming kids on the autistic spectrum has had any effect on mandatory group work and personal reflections. Or whether parental concerns have had any effect on schools choosing Reform Math. Or whether, for that matter, the Pope is Jewish.

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field).

the other Salman Khan

Found him while searching for 'my' Salman Khan at the Wall Street Journal -----

Salman Khan at WSJ

Salman Khan writing in the WSJ:

I soon discovered that people all over the world were watching my YouTube videos. More important, teachers were using them to change the basic rhythm of their classrooms. They asked their students to watch the videos at home and then used class time for actual problem-solving. Instead of 30 students listening passively to a one-size-fits-all lecture, they were learning at their own speed. Some could focus on filling in gaps in their arithmetic while others were able to jump ahead to trigonometry—and it all took place in the same classroom. It is often said that technology makes modern life less personal, but in this case, it has allowed teachers to take a big step toward humanizing their instruction.

[snip]

Last fall, we began a pilot program with the public schools in Los Altos, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley. The initial results are very promising. In order to help teachers customize their instruction, we created a dashboard of robust data for them to follow, linked to their students' online exercises. Students don't move on to more advanced concepts until they have mastered basic ones. Those who get "stuck" promptly receive help, often from peers who are already proficient in a subject. The overall effect has been to create a more collaborative classroom culture.

Turning the Classroom Upside Down
APRIL 9, 2011
By SALMAN KHAN

I'm skeptical.

I'm a fan of the videos, but when the content is slightly over my head, hitting pause doesn't help. Also, in spite of the fact that I have now read a bazillion articles on the disruptive possibilities of online learning, I still prefer books to videos. I don't know why. (Debbie Stier is having the same problem.)

e.g.: I've plowed through nearly 100 pages of Introduction to Counting and Probability on my own - not easy - without having looked at a single Khan video. I keep telling myself I should watch the Khan videos. . . and then I don't watch the Khan videos. Watching a Khan video on counting and probability seems like a chore; studying counting and probability in a book seems like fun.

I'm also skeptical that having students watch videos at home and then work problem sets in class eliminates all the efficiencies of grouping.  But we'll see.

Very interested in the Dashboard, though.

And I do watch the SAT solutions. Those are great - fantastically helpful.

Blended learning that brings Khan Academy into the classroom

In California they're piloting a program that brings the Khan Academy into the classroom.  It sounds promising, with the potential to gain efficiency and raise achievement levels.

You can read more at Education Quick Takes.

Salman Khan at TED

Let's use video to reinvent education

still haven't watched this -----

I will