Slashdot Mirror
The Future Deconstruction of the K-12 Teacher
An anonymous reader writes: English teacher Michael Godsey writes in The Atlantic what he envisions the role of teachers to be in the future. In a nutshell, he sees virtual classrooms, less pay, and a drastic decrease in the number of educators, but thinks they will all be "super-teachers". From the article: "Whenever a college student asks me, a veteran high-school English educator, about the prospects of becoming a public-school teacher, I never think it's enough to say that the role is shifting from 'content expert' to 'curriculum facilitator.' Instead, I describe what I think the public-school classroom will look like in 20 years, with a large, fantastic computer screen at the front, streaming one of the nation's most engaging, informative lessons available on a particular topic. The 'virtual class' will be introduced, guided, and curated by one of the country's best teachers (a.k.a. a "super-teacher"), and it will include professionally produced footage of current events, relevant excerpts from powerful TedTalks, interactive games students can play against other students nationwide, and a formal assessment that the computer will immediately score and record.
I tell this college student that in each classroom, there will be a local teacher-facilitator (called a 'tech') to make sure that the equipment works and the students behave. Since the 'tech' won't require the extensive education and training of today's teachers, the teacher's union will fall apart, and that "tech" will earn about $15 an hour to facilitate a class of what could include over 50 students. This new progressive system will be justified and supported by the American public for several reasons: Each lesson will be among the most interesting and efficient lessons in the world; millions of dollars will be saved in reduced teacher salaries; the 'techs' can specialize in classroom management; performance data will be standardized and immediately produced (and therefore 'individualized'); and the country will finally achieve equity in its public school system."
I tell this college student that in each classroom, there will be a local teacher-facilitator (called a 'tech') to make sure that the equipment works and the students behave. Since the 'tech' won't require the extensive education and training of today's teachers, the teacher's union will fall apart, and that "tech" will earn about $15 an hour to facilitate a class of what could include over 50 students. This new progressive system will be justified and supported by the American public for several reasons: Each lesson will be among the most interesting and efficient lessons in the world; millions of dollars will be saved in reduced teacher salaries; the 'techs' can specialize in classroom management; performance data will be standardized and immediately produced (and therefore 'individualized'); and the country will finally achieve equity in its public school system."
And who answers questions about the lectures?
performance data will be standardized and immediately produced (and therefore 'individualized')
What? How is that individualized in any way? Is this not the very inverse of individualized?
Wow, sounds like "one size fits all" to me. What a dismal world.
Some kids do great with books and classroom materials. Others of us excelled with a rapid flurry of hands-on programming and lab exercises, with healthy doses of welding, machining, soldering, and troubleshooting.
This sounds like a dismal future for public school, and a bright opportunity for private & charter schools.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
I dunno. I'm not an educator, but I'm pretty sure that when I was in school that there was more to the class than just the lecture. I don't think you can just roll a copy of something from "The Great Courses" and declare yourself done.
I would be very worried about any teacher that would reduce their own job to that.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Say some kid doesn't quite get what they were talking about in the lesson, and has additional questions. Where would that kid go? The local tech wouldn't be of any use - the kid's family would need to hire an outside tutor or some such. And if the family can't afford a tutor, well that's too bad.
This is the stupidest thing I have seen all day, all week, all month.
Leave education to the professionals please. Pay more and hire better folks.
Sounds like dystopia to me. Something about a bunch of kindergarteners staring at a giant screen seems very 1984.
At a time when we are realizing that students aren't all the same and we need to adapt our teaching strategies to each of them, this dude brilliantly claims that the future is to sit them all in front of a screen with no support. We need to hire more teachers, not less. Size of classroom is one of the most important variables for the effectiveness of teaching.
There was an idea to do something related not too long ago. Universities and Community Colleges panicked and thought all of their students would leave in the future and move completely online. MOOCs would traditional education.
The reality is that not all people want to learn that way. The Slashdot crowd might be able to be completely successful watching a screen and talking to an in-class "Tech", but most people are not like that. Many people attend community colleges and smaller universities because they can ask questions and get answers in a much smaller and personal setting.
If this idea had true mass potential, it would have happened already and community colleges would already be gone.
What this most reminds me of -- A drummer friend of mine was told, as a teenager by an older adult drummer in the 80's, not to take up the instrument because in the future all drumming would be done by electronic drum machines.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I got such a "super teacher" module for one of my high school kids (Kentucky Educational TV) with some great demos too. AP Physics B all in one year without the usual introductory Physics course. It was great. The kid worked hard, and switched from music and languages in high school to physics in college.
However she also had a great physics teacher to help her during lunch. I think it might reduce the local teachers time requirement per student 1/2-2/3, but not the skills. Ultimately the kids may have more equal opportunity to determine their level of education by their own interest, ability and effort in such a system.
We interrupt this class room broadcast to bring you "Waffles, Tastey Waffles," from Delicious Corp! If your mom doesn't buy you some, she's cheating on your father!
This won't work at all. One of the most basic requirements of teaching is that your teaching level correspond to those you teach; aim to high and you loose them because they don't understand, aim to low and you loose them because they are bored. Having one "super teacher" yapping one-way lectures from a giant screen without the "teacher" knowing what his pupils can, is simply a lost cause when it comes to engaging and teaching the pupils.
And why the giant screen? Why not having each pupil following an individual course on individual screens instead of forcing everybody to follow the same course. And why the classroom at all if its only function is to supervise discipline among the inmates/pupils.
(Why not just strap the pupils to a chair in their home and force feed them lectures through Occulus rift headsets and noise-cancelling headphones; it is easy to motive the pupils through reinforcement stimuli like tasing them gently if they have wrong answers. This will be very cheap and is guaranteed to produce marvellous results.)
"...relevant excerpts from powerful TedTalks..."
I threw up a bit in my mouth when I read that.
God save us from educational reform. We have had 30 years of it and things only get worse and worse. Less relevant course work, too many tests, talent driven out of the system, destruction of decent school lunches, no PE, etc. All that is left is sports and tests. The last 30 years has been an exercise in how to destroy an educational system.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Somebody thought of something very similar back in the early 1960s. Put the best lecturer in the school system in front of the television and sit the kids in the auditorium so they can watch and listen. The Miami-Dade County schools tested it for junior high school, using it for civics class in 9th grade and I forget what in the 7th and 8th. About two-thirds of the kids had the television course, and the rest of us had standard instruction. It was a complete disaster. The kids were wild at the best of times, and they took the television course as an invitation for mischief and worse. After all these years I can't remember the gory details, but it sank without trace. Behavior management was the immediate issue, but kids also need teacher interaction to learn. Conventional schooling has plenty of problems, but the television classroom showed how much worse it could be.
The very last jobs to be automated will be those requiring human interaction. This is what 95% of what a teacher's job is. People who make this prediction are woefully out of touch and think of teachers as mere babysitters. Schools are where kids learn to interact with other people, and in essence, what it means to be human. What exactly is the minimum-wage tech going to do when a child refuses to do their work? What will they do wen a child starts crying because other children are bullying them? When one kid throws a chair at another? How are they going to negotiate lesson plans and author legally binging agreements such as IEPs?
The TFA is an excellent example of that fraction of the population who has no idea what a K12 teaching job actually entails, but somehow thinks they understand it completely. As one of the respondents in this thread (who did understand it) put it, real teaching jobs will be one of the last to go, as they entail interaction between human beings. It's in the interaction that the best teaching happens. That's why K12 classes need to be smaller, and not like my 200+ member Biology 1 lecture at university forty years ago.
"THE ELEMENTS OF TELEDUCATION"
"... The threat to our future can be met
(snip)
"In short, without going into details, this is the way the proposed system, outlined by the writer in 1945, works:
"From a central point or points the best technical and science teachers in the land instruct via large wall projection color television AA the classes in the land. If the instructor of the moment is at Yale, the rest of the country is connected to that point. The next lecture may come from MIT in Massachusetts, from Caltech in California or from any other point because all institutions of learning are tied in to the national teleducation closed-circuit hookup. Such lectures will not be merely talk. The teacher - be he a physics, chemical, electrical or electronics professor - will instruct directly from the laboratory all important experiments and make clear any technical point by actual physical demonstration."
My step-daughter was literally math-illiterate upon entering college - very poor math SATs, couldn't multiply 1-digit numbers without a calculator, and didn't know that a+b commutes but a-b doesn't. I spent several hours a day 3-4 days a week with her, and through tremendous effort and lots of tears she earned all A's in Calculus 1 and 2 and Statistics. There is simply no way she could have even passed without my help (and a boost of self-motivation by a short stint in the real world earning near minimum wage with no college degree and no future).
Rich people will hire tutors to do the same thing. Poor people can't afford to and rarely have anyone like me around to help. So the rich will get ahead regardless of ability; other than a few exceptionally talented ones, the poor will get further behind, continuing the cycle of failure and poverty.
There is something about individual interaction that can't be duplicated with a computer or projection screen. A 50-to-1 student/teacher ratio with little individual one-on-one instruction is going to make things much worse.
God save us from educational reform. We have had 30 years of it and things only get worse and worse. Less relevant course work, too many tests, talent driven out of the system, destruction of decent school lunches, no PE, etc. All that is left is sports and tests. The last 30 years has been an exercise in how to destroy an educational system.
There's a story that Mayor Koch in New York had an old Lady stop him and say, "Mayor, make it how it used to be." And he said, "Lady, it was never like that."
Educational reform is the only thing we have to try to make the system better, and it's not good enough right now. Some of the time--maybe even most of the time--it is going to be the wrong reform. And then you try something else.
School was terribly done 30 years ago. It's terrible today. Not only because we keep getting the material wrong, but because we haven't BEGUN to figure out the right social dynamics yet, at least as a society.
A teacher *cannot* have absolute control of their classroom, or else abusive teachers will abuse the kids and hurt their development. A teacher *needs* very strong support from their administration and the ability to have an effective response to troublemaking, or they will be unable to run an effective classroom. An administration needs to be afraid enough of being sued that they don't do anything crazy, but willing enough to be sued that they can fail a child, discipline a child, or even put a child to work mopping a floor--so long as they do it respectfully and in order to further the child's social and academic development. A school should be able to assign chores just like a parent can. But you need good oversight, so kids aren't picked on. A teacher who picks on kids all the time needs to be fired. The *Union* should work to fire them. The union should care enough about the kids and their own profession that it wants to keep bad teachers from working.
No one will listen to recorded, broadcast lessons. They want a live teacher giving a lecture.
They tried that with sports and no one watches sports broadcasts. Everyone goes to a local game instead, even though the local performances aren't as good as the best athletes in the world.
They tried that with dramatic performances, and no one watches movies. Everyone would rather go to a community theater performance.
They tried that with music, and no one listens to pre-recorded music. Everyone would rather listen to a live performance.
Recorded content and broadcasting are a fad.
This has been "envisioned" time and again for at least half a century. It always fails. Sure, most teachers are not really good, but as it turns out, they are a lot better than a good one on a TV screen. Distance education works only for those that can also self-learn. That experience has been made by distance educators time and again, whether snail-mail and paper, email, TV, videos or interactive virtual classrooms were used. For most peoples, an educator that is not physically there does not cut it.
This whole thing is only intended to make education a lot cheaper, not better. And it fails at that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
We may not have flying cars, but we already have a one-size-fits-all educational system. Mainstreaming, where slower learners and those with reduced cognitive function are added to classrooms (with and without aids, depending on severity) brings up the bottom, and all but the brightest on standardized are discouraged from entering "gifted and talented" programs. Teaching is aimed at producing the maximum number of passing grades on standardized tests.
The top and bottom 2% are weeded out - charter schools or G/T at the top, traditional special ed for those who will never achieve. The other 96% are lumped together and the teacher is salary-bound to make as many of them pass as possible. That means standardized worksheets and test prep pretty much from day one. The result? The bottom 10%, which would require extraordinary help to pass, are dropped as a waste of effort, the next 30% get most of the attention to try and get them to make the grade, and the rest of the class pretty much floats for the year with little or no real instruction because they learn well enough from the books and videos to get a passing grade. Anyone in the top 30 percentile points is bored to tears.
There are exceptions to this, of course. Some teachers put in lots of extra time and effort, others are the truly gifted teachers who weave engaging lesson plans and get the kids interested enough to retain the knowledge and pass the tests without crazy drilling. But, for the most part, when your job depends on hitting a number and there's no accounting for whether you have the smart class or the dumb class you're going to get a rhythm down and stick to it. At least if the test scored come back poor, you can open you planner and show all the drills and fact sheets you went over showing you covered the material.
It's pretty damned sad.
(Oh, and as for private schools...have you seen the cost? It's unlikely a family with 2 children who aren't in the top 10% of wage earners are going to be able to afford 12 years of private education. The opportunity is there, but the consumers to support it are pretty thin.)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Every technical revolution in education since Edison's wax cylinder phonograph or prior has been prophesied to replace classroom teachers.
A brief list:
The Gutenberg press.
Edison's phonograph.
Classes by mail.
Voice radio.
Television.
Two way video.
Multi user computer terminals.
Microcomputers.
Multimedia software.
The internet.
This too will become a minor fad, blossom, fade, and find a very minor place in the ongoing art of education.
I describe what I think the public-school classroom will look like in 20 years, with a large, fantastic computer screen at the front, streaming one of the nation’s most engaging, informative lessons available on a particular topic. ...And I stopped. This guy doesn't get it.
You could have the most engaging, informative lesson on the face of the planet, and kids may still not listen to it. Maybe they didn't get much sleep last night. Perhaps they ate at McDonalds for breakfast and have a sugar rush. Sometimes they feel depressed, because they just broke up with their significant other. Maybe the topic is about mathematics, a subject that's just difficult to understand. There's a possibility the student is dyslexic. And this is not even the tip of the iceberg.
Generally, humans need inspiration, and they are best inspired by other humans, education no exception. There is a small subset of students who possess enough initiative and tenacity that, even at a young age, they find success by their own merits. But the majority of students face challenges that interfere with their motivation to learn. They need to be coached through these challenges, actions requiring insight into the human psyche, something computers have yet to achieve.
To draw a parallel, do we yet see any high school sports teams being coached by a computer? Shouldn't a computer be better equipped to analyze plays, to determine strengths and weaknesses of players, and to determine strategies that have the greatest probability of success? What does the coach have that the computer doesn't?
that the author is pointing out is that it'll be incredibly profitable to run these sorts of "schools". Sure, they won't work. But who cares so long as the money keeps flowing in. And what alternative will you have? Unless you're rich there won't be any. Sure, some of the /. crowd might realize that's morally wrong, but the rest of America will continue to blame themselves. It's something we do a lot of and goes back to that whole puritanical self flagellation thing that's been buries in our skulls.
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Sounds like dystopia to me. Something about a bunch of kindergarteners staring at a giant screen seems very 1984.
I think the truly intractable problem is that such a system would centralize control of the educational system. Centralize it right down to every single word that is presented. The true power of the public education system is that it gives teachers a great deal of independence in what they say in the classroom. Imagine a situation when something terrible happens in our democracy. Someone seizes control. The system gets even more perverted than it already is. Then imagine an educational system where children only received "approved" resources. No independent human teacher. Just video and text. If the children don't get information from the media, then they will effectively be blind to reality.
I know this is hypothetical, but I think it demonstrates my point, that independent teachers are an essential buffer against tyranny emerging in our democracy.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
From personal experience, I don't know where this educational reform is you are talking about. I went through a good set of public schools in the 70's in a good middle class school system. The Friday night football game was the highlight of the week at high school. Classes were pretty good, the kids that wanted to, got into good colleges. Now, 40 years later, my kids are going through a good set of public schools in a good middle class school system. The Friday night football game is the highlight of the week at high school. The kids that want to are getting into good colleges. Two main differences from my experiences -- my kids seem to be learning more advanced concepts in math and science sooner than I did and the school district doesn't offer Driver's Ed as an elective. I wish that Driver's Ed was an elective, other than that the K-12 education experience seems as good or better than what I got.
People like to point fingers, especially when something as important schools are failing our kids
The only thing is, it is not the schools which have failed the students
No, not the teachers either (although some of the teachers shouldn't be there in the first place)
The root failure is the way modern education has been run
We put 20-odd kids inside a room, give them standardized books, putting them through a standardized curriculum and expect all of them to come out to be successful
Kids are different. Some are smarter than others. Some are more active than others.
Some like abstract things such as math / science
Others find beauty in languages, and so on
Furthermore the way a kid learns may not be the same as the way another kid learns
The way we put the kids through the education is like that proverbial doctor who prescribes aspirin to all his patients no matter what kind of illness(es) the patients happen to have
The meaning of Education is to Bring Up , to Train
What exactly are we training our kids? To be a conformist? To follow the leader? To grow up to be a sheeple?
That "English teacher" in TFA, Mr. Michael Godsey, does not even have a clue about education
He doesn't care about his students
He doesn't care if his students are being properly trained
He doesn't care if his students learn anything
All he cares is about how much he gets paid
That is why I say, the root cause of the failure is Education itself --- and as an extension, we ourselves have failed our children
We have stopped educating our children
Instead, we put them through a conveyor belt, and expect them to be molded by the school system
We have forgotten that as parents we are the primary custodians of our children, that the chief job we as parents are to train our children
Oh, I can hear it now ... many moan and bitch about not having time, about how tired they are after coming home from work, and so on, and so forth
Well ... to me it's all nothing but excuses
If we are to bring up our children with excuses it would be better if we have no children
If we are to have children of our own it's our duty to bring them up, to train them, to make sure that they can grow up tapping into their full potentials - no matter which field they decide to be in when they grow up, that they are well equipped to carry out whatever that they do
This has all been tried and failed before. But they'd have known that if they learnt from history. I guess he needs a History "super teacher" session or few.
It's almost as bad as the "everyone can learn [insert insanely difficult subject area here]" with the best teachers and all that of course, and no particular requirement for aptitude or engagement by the student.
As for me, the most I ever expect from a teacher is to be average over time.
Those roles can't be done by some national "super teacher."
The other problem is who decides the criteria for being "super"? Different people find different teachers effective. For example I know that Feynman was regarded by most as a "super teacher" but I hated his books and found his explanations needlessly complicated and far more confusing than most other textbooks. In short I found him a terrible teacher. I realize I'm in the minority with that but the point is that not everyone will agree on who a super teacher is because different people learn differently. This is why you need to learn from a variety of teachers and not just the most popular.
How is what he's arguing significantly different from video lectures? We've had VCRs with the ability to replace a classroom like this for a long time. But, other than teachers who would sometimes show a video during his class, videos haven't replaced teachers.
I had a class in college that was broadcast. It wasn't as engaging as in person, even though the lecturer was engaging. There was no opportunity for discussion, though some lectures don't have much opportunity for that, anyway. But, K-12 aren't 200 person lectures. They're much more interactive.