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Melinda Gates: Facebook Engineers Have Solved One of Education's Biggest Problem
theodp writes: Asked by the NY Times if Silicon Valley is saving the world or just making money, Melinda Gates replied, "I can say without a doubt — because I've seen it — that some of them [SV companies] are innovating in ways that make life better for billions of people." As an example, BillG's better half suggests that a handful of Facebook engineers have solved one of education's biggest problems with their 20% time project at billionaire-backed Summit Public Schools, a small charter school operator. Gates writes, "One of the biggest problems in American education is that teachers have to teach 30 students with different learning styles at the same time. Developers at Facebook, however, have built an online system that gives teachers the information and tools they need to design individualized lessons. The result is that teachers can spend their time doing what they're best at: inspiring kids." Some people — like the late Roger Ebert — might not be quite as impressed as Melinda to see Silicon Valley trying to reinvent the 1960's personalized-learning-wheel in 2015!
Facebook Engineers Have Solved One of Education's Biggest Problem
Is that problem the bad use of English?
I'd rather spend money ( if I had a billion dollars) on wikivarsity or wikibooks projects . We need quality open content in wiki form which is accessible to all .
Sounds like more work for the teachers, and my guess is that would be without extra pay. Even with the aid of technology, individual lessons means more time required on the teachers part. How about just reduce the number of students per teacher?
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
> "If you have three Pepsis and drink one, how much more refreshed are you? You, the redhead in the Chicago school system?"
> "Pepsi?"
> "Partial credit!"
I expect we should all wait for John Steward to way in; as he is the Samuel Clemens of our time and gives great insight to those of us with nothing positive to say about the whole thing.
If only there was a way to get kids with similar learning styles into the same classes.... some sort of test they could give kids, the same test even to all the kids, standardized to identify their strengths and weaknesses, and pickup on their learning styles and then group them into smaller organizations, a class or something so that a teacher that excels at one style of teaching can educate kids that excel at that style of learning....
To bad that's impossible, or it'd be a great idea.
Billionaires try to convince people they are wonderful.
Roger was a great socialist from the old country who walked to and from school in deep deep snow, with a bearskin rug wrapped around him for warmth, and boiled potatoes in his pockets for warmth. His silicone chin was a pleasure to all, and he often shook it and wiggled it for his wife's pleasure at the diner table.
You must have gone through the Facebook school system, congrats!
No . He designed it
Why is Belinda Gates referred to as Bill's 'better half'? That's so wrong on so many levels. You can say that as a 'joke', but written in an article, it's very wrong.
I did not know that. The cow goes mooo.
One of the biggest problems in American education is that teachers have to teach 30 students with different learning styles at the same time.
At some point that is pretty much an irreducible problem. You have finite (and too often shrinking) resources to spend on each pupil and teaching isn't something that generally scales very well, especially with young people and even more especially when you want to customize it per pupil. Furthermore it's not as if each of the 30 students "learning styles" have no overlap or that a non-optimized teaching method cannot still be effective. I think that it is great that people are working hard to try to improve education but I think the notion that we're going to somehow leverage some online system to make magical improvements is a bit naive. None of that is unique to the American education system - any teacher anywhere would have the same problems.
Developers at Facebook, however, have built an online system that gives teachers the information and tools they need to design individualized lessons.
Great they built an online system. They're hardly the first. Why should we believe this system will be any better than the innumerable past attempts? I read the article and it provides no real insight into what is different nor any data regarding how effective it is.
The result is that teachers can spend their time doing what they're best at: inspiring kids.
I am pretty involved in my local school (I have a part time staff position there) and work closely with many teachers throughout the school year. The notion that what most teachers do best is "inspiring kids" is nonsense, and as far as I can tell meaningless too. Some do "inspire" but it certainly isn't "what they're best at" for most of them. Furthermore you can inspire people all you want but that isn't the same thing as teaching them. Effective teaching requires more than getting students excited about a topic. And most teachers I've ever had weren't especially good at "inspiring kids". Many teachers have a pretty negative and cynical attitude unfortunately and more than a few don't exactly have a passion for teaching much less inspiring. Maybe this tool is great but my guess is that it really probably doesn't improve things much and likely only will work well in fairly specific circumstances.
I deal with kids who have FAR bigger issues than worrying about tailoring a lesson plan. Getting food on the table, dealing with a disfunctional or abusive home life, parents who are simply not involved, etc. That's not to say tailored lesson plans aren't an important problem but it's no where near the top of the heap of serious problems facing our schools.
I'm not really understanding. What does this Facebook solotion do that couldn't be done on a piece of paper? The problem is the work involved in developing each lesson, not in the tracking of each lesson once it is developed. Does this Facebook plan eliminate the work involved in coming up with separate plans?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
... the driving force behind Microsoft "Bob"...
Maybe, if instead of skipping out on billions of dollars in taxes, Microsoft paid them, we could put enought teachers in the schools to cut the class sizes to more like the 18-20 they should be handling.
Creating "personalized" lessons has not been proven valuable but providing students with a variety has. https://youtu.be/C9hTWRwfZOc
This would be great, but it is likely not true. According to more recent research kid's learning styles is not true. This theory has been reported as fact, but is not backed up by science. In fact it is better to get a kid out of their comfort zone for them to learn more.
https://thinkneuroscience.word...
-Matt
Certainly students vary in ability and interests, but learning styles, in the sense that some learn visually, some aurally, etc., don't seems to exist. In increasing levels of rigor, see
Some people — like the late Roger Ebert — might not be quite as impressed as Melinda to see Silicon Valley trying to reinvent the 1960's personalized-learning-wheel in 2015!
Well, you know what they say... What goes around comes around.
It's yet another flipped classroom concept where the students are expected to learn the material on their own, with the teacher acting as de facto manager and cheerleader of the instructional process. It can work if the school devotes a lot of money to creating and maintaining the online content, and if the parents are actively involved in their childrens' education. Otherwise, it devolves into yet another failed attempt at online education.
It isn't surprising that a former Microsoft manager would think that turning teachers into middle-level managers would be a good idea. But from many years of my own teaching experience, I would argue that teachers "inspire" by actually being passionate and knowledgeable about a subject, not by micromanaging each student's progress with an online spreadsheet.
They think teachers best attribute is that they inspire kids, false. Teachers teach educate and make sure the kids are ready for real life. Inspiration is the sole domain of the kids, are they inspired by the world around them after they have learnt a shit load of stuff.
Fuck gates and their ilk. fuck the cunts
Sure! One of Education's Biggest Problem: Getting advertizing into the classroom.
At one charter school? How did they measure the impact on teachers' time? What impact did it have on students? Was there a controlled study which compensated for Socio-economic status, age, regional differences, etc.? Was there a longitude study which tracked student performance over time? Or is this just wishful thinking and huckstering?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
While it is admirable to try to speed-bin people, it makes things worse. For those caught on the wrong side, it amplifies faults while nullifying any gains.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
So when asked for a life-betterment achievement of Sillicon Valley, the oracle comes up with...yet. another. tech. solution. to solve a likely insoluble problem with no track record whatever. It's all bullshit. SV wants to make money. No more no less. Nothing wrong with that, but they abandoned religion and see themselves as gods. The tech 'titans' need to get over themselves.
Can you fix that crap? And while you're at it, can you install a politics filter that will automagically delete anybody's politically-motivated posting? That'd be great, thanks. Oh, and how about a Dislike button?
What if the students were in virtual classrooms (using VR headsets)? Each student would "jack into" the classroom with the teaching style that works best for them.
Who is doing the teaching? The fundamental limitation is the amount of time that a teacher has to spend with each student is finite and I can assure you that most students are not highly motivated to learn. If you have heaping gobs of money you can improve this limitation to a point but sooner or later you'll hit a ceiling. Technology can extend the effectiveness of a teacher sometimes but not by much. This is not a technology problem. It is an economic problem - specifically a resource optimization problem. (money, brains and time) Technology can help in some cases but it isn't a cure all and it tends to get used poorly. You are trying to get the best outcome with finite resources so the question is how best to spend those resources.
And your VR headset idea is a solution in search of a problem like most things relating to VR. I used to work with VR technologies as my primary job a few years back so I have a ton of experience here. The use cases for VR are incredibly narrow despite what the folks at Occulus would have you believe. It's cool but not nearly as useful as many hope. I really don't see much use for it for educating children. The bang for the buck would be absurdly poor.
The supposition that personalized structures will motivate kids who are only in school because they are forced to be there ignores the lack of motivation in today's society of a very large proportion of students.
I know one 15 year old white kit who has never been seen carrying a book home. His single mom tells him he is going to be a famous baseball player, so "Why study?"
She meant to say, "they are innovating in ways that make life better for the billionaire people."
http://www.nea.org/home/rankin...
When you talk about overloaded classrooms you're talking about STEM classrooms.
We have plenty of teachers. In fact, we could fire a lot of them and still be below 18-20 per class.
The issue is that we specialize in worthless teachers who collect full paychecks with empty classrooms because they're not competent enough to step in and teach a STEM period or two. As if the standards for becoming a K-12 math teacher are even particularly difficult.
As a bonus for firing a lot of worthless teachers and actually having full classrooms, we can give significant raises to the teachers we actually need. Which will in turn attract a lot more competent teachers who can solve other issues.
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Call me old fashioned but I do not think teachers need be concerned with inspiring students. To be a student requires a strong desire to be educated along with a willingness to suffer to get an education. If that is not present simply dump the kid into the jungle and let them live a life of hard manual labor or the jail and prison routine. Frankly if a kid is not sharp enough to realize that huge fortunes can be made by acquiring a high level of education the kid is so out of touch and disoriented that trying to turn him around is sort of a wasted effort.
Mandatory streaming, as practiced outside the US, only makes the problem worse by divining one's entire life based on the performance of a small number of tests. Make the wrong score, get locked out of education save for bottom-tier, perpetually-unskilled vocational schooling.
On the other hand, the US system does not lock in status and concentrates on continual display of merit. It takes anyone and gives them the best opportunity to succeed. In the US system, AP Honors is a nice thing to have but not necessary for entry. Competence is recognized without the rigidity that you want to see in education.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
UK-style streaming enforces a rigidity that have lifetime implications if someone is unlucky enough to be on the wrong side of the score.
In your system, despite having technical talent, low secondary scores would have shunted me off to a vocationally-oriented school that would provide a very limited scope of highly precarious work opportunities. I would have to possess some favorable peerage status (or be from a very wealthy/influential family) to overcome that in any reasonable amount of time.
On the other hand, the US system allowed me to fix my issues, attend a good university, and graduate at the top of my class. That, and I managed to find good FTE work for a non-agency-based employer during said education - something equally impossible for my UK equivalent.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
That kind of rigidity is worse than the UK system, since it explicitly locks out education for having the wrong number. Any talent or otherwise demonstrated competence useful enough for higher-tier work gets killed off if not supported by The Number. The N-1 approach doesn't help since it throws you far enough behind to be clearly seen as a lower-tier individual and thus only worth lower-tier work arrangements.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
That's a case of being inordinately lucky. On the other hand, the US system doesn't need such good fortune - as education is not locked out like it is in other parts of the world.
What of individuals that routinely get stuck in a low-tier track but show high-tier competence at the wrong time?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The history of progressive education is even older. John Dewey was writing about this stuff at the turn of the last century, and he was building on the works of other eductators, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey#On_education_and_teacher_education
Your number seemed very low from my experiences, so I took a look at your link and found this:
"According to recent studies, the difference between student-teacher ratio and average class size in K-3 is 9 or 10 students "
So in reality it's closer to 30 kids per classroom.
horror vacui
the subject already scared the shit out of me. ...
the abstract made me feel just sad.
then i realized this is just surreptitious advertising and everything's ok again. sort of
>an online system that gives teachers the information and tools they need to design individualized lessons
So the same thing they've been doing, but *in the cloud*. I don't think I'm one of the billions of people that that will make life better for.
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
The high school level is a recommendation that is based on the teacher's evaluation, not on a test. There is a test, but schools can only adjust their recommendation upwards if a student exceeds expectations on the test, they cannot lower it if the student does badly. Not all schools will let you enroll at a level exceeding the recommendation, but some do if they feel grades and performance are sufficient. Some high schools that teach at multiple levels have a "bridge year" which is the same for everyone, after which they perform their own evaluation. So the system isn't as rigid as it seems. Even so, I do agree that the UK system is better if it can accommodate all those students taking classes at their own level (no idea how that works out in practice).
I'd like to add that I have never heard of anyone being viewed in a negative light for having climbed a level or two, on the contrary. First of all, it's not public knowledge and employers do not need to know. Second: going that route demonstrates perseverance... which is probably why not a single person I have ever met was hesitant to admit that they got a lower recommendation and later made up for it.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
16-24 Students Per Class
Times 5 Classes
=80 to 120 Students Per Year
Typically teachers have 1 paid hour to prepare the delivery of these lessons, grade assignments, etc.
120 Students / 60 Minutes = 30 Seconds of planning / grading per student.
Why do you think math is the hardest teaching position to fill?
The Mother of Clippy says that somebody mashed up some code to solve all the world's education problems. I say: something of a wild exaggeration. Not the part about mothering Clippy.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Right, my point is that the average is 15.9. So if some classrooms have 30 kids and the average is 15.9, that proves the point that there are a lot of classrooms with less than 15.9 kids so that the average is 15.9.
That's the whole point of averages.
Every classroom could have 15.9 kids, but because we like paying people not to do anything, we have 30 kids in one room and (30 + x) / 2 = 15.9 which works to 30 + x = 31.8, x = 1.8
For every 30 kid classroom there can be a classroom with 1.8 kids and the average is 15.9
Which is my whole point that we have a lot of half empty classrooms with teachers collecting a full paycheck while other teachers have overflowing classrooms for the same pay.
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Dude. do you not understand the difference between student/teacher ratio and classroom size?