Об инновационных методах преподавания
Нас часто убеждают, что не стоит изобретать велосипед или колесо, что все новое - это хорошо забытое старое. Наверное, в большей части случаев это так и есть, но не всегда. И тот, кто не принимает "избитых истин" на веру, часто оказывается вознагражденным за своей скепсис и сомнения.
Позволю себе целиком скопировать сюда недавнюю статью из "The Economist". В ней рассказывается о г-не Хане и о его новом подходе к организации занятий в школах, реализованых в виде Интернет-портала KhanAcademy, который авторы статьи не постеснялись назвать революционным. Впрочем, судите сами:
Flipping the classroom
Hopes that the internet can improve teaching may at last be bearing fruit
THE 12-year-olds filing into Courtney Cadwell’s classroom at Egan
Junior High in Los Altos, a leafy suburb of Silicon Valley, each take a
white MacBook from a trolley, log on to a website called KhanAcademy.org
and begin doing maths exercises. They will not get a lecture from Ms
Cadwell, because they have already viewed, at home, various lectures as
video clips on KhanAcademy (given by Salman Khan, its founder). And Ms
Cadwell, logged in as a “coach”, can see exactly who has watched which.
This means that class time is now free for something else: one-on-one
instruction by Ms Cadwell, or what used to be known as tutoring.
So Ms Cadwell, in her own web browser, pulls up a dashboard where
KhanAcademy’s software presents, through the internet, the data the
children are producing at that instant. She can view information for the
entire class or any individual pupil. Just then she sees two fields,
representing modules, turning from green to red, one for Andrea, the
other for Asia. Ms Cadwell sees that Andrea is struggling with
exponents, Asia with fractions. “Instead of having to guess where my
students have gaps, I can see it, at that moment, and I walk over to
that one student,” says Ms Cadwell, as she arrives at Asia’s chair.
While the other pupils continue to work at their own pace and at
different problems, Ms Cadwell now spends a few minutes just with Andrea
and Asia. Soon Andrea has an epiphany and starts firing correct
answers, getting, in KhanAcademy’s jargon, a “badge”, then going
“transonic”. A few minutes later, Asia also gets a “streak”. She lets
out a shriek. Ms Cadwell, with a big smile, is off to another pupil.
“The growth in these kids is just staggering,” she says. “This is the
future. I don’t see how it couldn’t be.”
This reversal of the traditional teaching methods-with lecturing done
outside class time and tutoring (or “homework”) during it-is what Mr
Khan calls “the flip”. A synonym for flip, of course, is revolution, and
this experiment in Los Altos just might lead to one. For although only a
handful of classes in this public-school district tried the method in
the last school year, many other schools, private and public, are now
expressing interest, and the methodology is spreading.
Indeed, philanthropists such as Bill Gates have such high hopes for
the new method that they have given money to KhanAcademy, a tiny
non-profit organisation based in Mountain View, next to Los Altos. This
means that the more than 2,400 video lectures, on anything from
arithmetic and finance to chemistry and history, will remain free for
anybody.
If KhanAcademy were merely about those online lectures, of course, it
would be in good but large company. Increasingly, teachers, professors
and other experts make their talks available online: on iTunes, YouTube
or university websites. Some, such as Michael Sandel at Harvard with his
philosophy lectures, have become minor celebrities. More and more sites
exist purely to spread learning-some free, such as AcademicEarth.org;
others not, such as TheGreatCourses.com.
Watching lectures online, or on a smartphone or iPad on the go, has
advantages, as Mr Khan has discovered from the huge number of comments
he gets on his site. Children (or adults, for that matter) need no
longer feel ashamed when they have to review part or all of a lecture
several times. So they can advance at their own pace.
But lectures, whether online or in the flesh, play only a limited
role in education. Research shows that the human brain accepts new
concepts largely through constant recall while interacting socially.
This suggests that good teaching must “de-emphasise lecture and
emphasise active problem-solving,” says Carl Wieman, a winner of the
Nobel prize in physics and an adviser to Barack Obama.
To KhanAcademy’s fans, the flip that Mr Khan advocates helps to do
just that. As a tool, KhanAcademy individualises teaching and makes it
interactive and fun. Maths “is social now,” says Kami Thordarson, as the
10-year-olds in the 5th-grade class she teaches at Santa Rita
Elementary School huddle round their laptops to solve arithmetic
problems as though they were trading baseball cards or marbles.
The system has its detractors. First, it may not be much use beyond
“numerate” subjects such as maths and the sciences; KhanAcademy does
have a few history offerings, but they are less convincing than the huge
number of maths and science ones. Second, even in these subjects
KhanAcademy implicitly reinforces the “sit-and-get” philosophy of
teaching, thinks Frank Noschese, a high-school physics teacher in New
York. That is, it still “teaches to the test”, without necessarily
engaging pupils more deeply. Worse, says Mr Noschese, KhanAcademy’s
deliberate “gamification” of learning-all those cute and addictive
“meteorite badges”-may have the “disastrous consequence” of making
pupils mechanically repeat lower-level exercises to win awards, rather
than formulating questions and applying concepts.
The teachers now using KhanAcademy counter that it is meant to be
merely one, not the only, teaching tool, and that by freeing up class
time it also makes possible other projects that do exactly what Mr
Noschese promotes. In the fifth-grade class at Santa Rita, the children
have made a tile floor (requiring fancy maths to estimate sizes, shapes
and numbers). When this correspondent visited, they practised on
KhanAcademy but then played SKUNK, a game involving probability.
America’s standardised tests are now “easy, a floor, not of
interest”, says Ms Thordarson. She feels that the tool thus allows her
to teach better and go deeper. But “You have to be more creative and
more flexible, which is challenging,” she says. It’s not for teachers
who “want to turn a page in a book”, adds Kelly Rafferty, the
co-teacher. They thereby answer one common misconception about
KhanAcademy: that it makes live teachers less relevant. Mr Khan, the
teachers and Mr Gates all insist that the opposite is the case. It can
liberate a good teacher to become even better. Of course, it can also
make it easy for a bad teacher to cop out.
The value of teachers
The arrival of a powerful new tool thus does not replace the other
necessary element in education reform, the raising of teacher quality.
Good teaching is the single biggest variable in educating pupils, bigger
than class size, family background or school funding, says Eric
Hanushek, an education expert at Stanford University’s Hoover
Institution. And crucial to having better teachers is evaluating them
properly, hiring, firing and promoting on merit.
The teachers’ unions, however, are fighting all attempts to move away
from systems in which pay and tenure are linked only to seniority and
credentials. In some places, such as Washington, DC, the reformers have
won a few skirmishes; in others, such as Los Angeles, the unions are
digging in for a long war. The core question is how, even whether,
teachers can be evaluated fairly on the basis of exam results or
classroom observation (given that some pupils are from educated
families, others from poor areas, and so on). The unions are doing their
best to ensure that evaluations have no consequences in staffing.
Technology can play a part here, because, in essence, evaluation is
an information problem. Today’s standardised tests are deservedly
unpopular with teachers and parents because, first, the “standards” tend
to be low (and easily lowered further); second, teaching to the test is
a form of dumbing down; and third, the tests take place only once or
twice a year.
By contrast, spend a few minutes playing with the KhanAcademy
dashboard of a class in Los Altos, and you see a vision of the future.
You can follow the progress of each child-where she started, how she
progressed, where she got stuck and “unstuck” (as Ms Thordarson likes to
put it). You can also view the progress of the entire class. And you
could aggregate the information of all the classes taught by one
teacher, of an entire school or even district, with data covering a
whole year.
Dennis van Roekel, the president of the National Education
Association (NEA), the largest labour union in America with 3.2m
members, goes ballistic at this suggestion. “Don’t demean the
profession” by implying that you can rate teachers with numbers, he
says. Besides, this sort of thing would introduce destructive
competition into a culture that should be collaborative, he adds
(without explaining why data-driven evaluations have not destroyed
collaboration in other industries).
The NEA and its supporters will eventually lose this fight, says Kate
Walsh, the president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a
think-tank that unions love to hate. “It will be considered fair game to
collect the data” and to use them to get better teachers in America’s
classrooms, she says. It may or may not be KhanAcademy’s software that
produces this information. Nonetheless, the academy, “by offering a
different model, is forcing the issue that people have speculated
about”, says Mr Hanushek at Stanford. “These technological ideas offer
the possibility of breaking a logjam.”
Оригинал http://www.economist.com/node/21529062
Позволю себе целиком скопировать сюда недавнюю статью из "The Economist". В ней рассказывается о г-не Хане и о его новом подходе к организации занятий в школах, реализованых в виде Интернет-портала KhanAcademy, который авторы статьи не постеснялись назвать революционным. Впрочем, судите сами:
Flipping the classroom
Hopes that the internet can improve teaching may at last be bearing fruit
THE 12-year-olds filing into Courtney Cadwell’s classroom at Egan
Junior High in Los Altos, a leafy suburb of Silicon Valley, each take a
white MacBook from a trolley, log on to a website called KhanAcademy.org
and begin doing maths exercises. They will not get a lecture from Ms
Cadwell, because they have already viewed, at home, various lectures as
video clips on KhanAcademy (given by Salman Khan, its founder). And Ms
Cadwell, logged in as a “coach”, can see exactly who has watched which.
This means that class time is now free for something else: one-on-one
instruction by Ms Cadwell, or what used to be known as tutoring.
So Ms Cadwell, in her own web browser, pulls up a dashboard where
KhanAcademy’s software presents, through the internet, the data the
children are producing at that instant. She can view information for the
entire class or any individual pupil. Just then she sees two fields,
representing modules, turning from green to red, one for Andrea, the
other for Asia. Ms Cadwell sees that Andrea is struggling with
exponents, Asia with fractions. “Instead of having to guess where my
students have gaps, I can see it, at that moment, and I walk over to
that one student,” says Ms Cadwell, as she arrives at Asia’s chair.
While the other pupils continue to work at their own pace and at
different problems, Ms Cadwell now spends a few minutes just with Andrea
and Asia. Soon Andrea has an epiphany and starts firing correct
answers, getting, in KhanAcademy’s jargon, a “badge”, then going
“transonic”. A few minutes later, Asia also gets a “streak”. She lets
out a shriek. Ms Cadwell, with a big smile, is off to another pupil.
“The growth in these kids is just staggering,” she says. “This is the
future. I don’t see how it couldn’t be.”
This reversal of the traditional teaching methods-with lecturing done
outside class time and tutoring (or “homework”) during it-is what Mr
Khan calls “the flip”. A synonym for flip, of course, is revolution, and
this experiment in Los Altos just might lead to one. For although only a
handful of classes in this public-school district tried the method in
the last school year, many other schools, private and public, are now
expressing interest, and the methodology is spreading.
Indeed, philanthropists such as Bill Gates have such high hopes for
the new method that they have given money to KhanAcademy, a tiny
non-profit organisation based in Mountain View, next to Los Altos. This
means that the more than 2,400 video lectures, on anything from
arithmetic and finance to chemistry and history, will remain free for
anybody.
If KhanAcademy were merely about those online lectures, of course, it
would be in good but large company. Increasingly, teachers, professors
and other experts make their talks available online: on iTunes, YouTube
or university websites. Some, such as Michael Sandel at Harvard with his
philosophy lectures, have become minor celebrities. More and more sites
exist purely to spread learning-some free, such as AcademicEarth.org;
others not, such as TheGreatCourses.com.
Watching lectures online, or on a smartphone or iPad on the go, has
advantages, as Mr Khan has discovered from the huge number of comments
he gets on his site. Children (or adults, for that matter) need no
longer feel ashamed when they have to review part or all of a lecture
several times. So they can advance at their own pace.
But lectures, whether online or in the flesh, play only a limited
role in education. Research shows that the human brain accepts new
concepts largely through constant recall while interacting socially.
This suggests that good teaching must “de-emphasise lecture and
emphasise active problem-solving,” says Carl Wieman, a winner of the
Nobel prize in physics and an adviser to Barack Obama.
To KhanAcademy’s fans, the flip that Mr Khan advocates helps to do
just that. As a tool, KhanAcademy individualises teaching and makes it
interactive and fun. Maths “is social now,” says Kami Thordarson, as the
10-year-olds in the 5th-grade class she teaches at Santa Rita
Elementary School huddle round their laptops to solve arithmetic
problems as though they were trading baseball cards or marbles.
The system has its detractors. First, it may not be much use beyond
“numerate” subjects such as maths and the sciences; KhanAcademy does
have a few history offerings, but they are less convincing than the huge
number of maths and science ones. Second, even in these subjects
KhanAcademy implicitly reinforces the “sit-and-get” philosophy of
teaching, thinks Frank Noschese, a high-school physics teacher in New
York. That is, it still “teaches to the test”, without necessarily
engaging pupils more deeply. Worse, says Mr Noschese, KhanAcademy’s
deliberate “gamification” of learning-all those cute and addictive
“meteorite badges”-may have the “disastrous consequence” of making
pupils mechanically repeat lower-level exercises to win awards, rather
than formulating questions and applying concepts.
The teachers now using KhanAcademy counter that it is meant to be
merely one, not the only, teaching tool, and that by freeing up class
time it also makes possible other projects that do exactly what Mr
Noschese promotes. In the fifth-grade class at Santa Rita, the children
have made a tile floor (requiring fancy maths to estimate sizes, shapes
and numbers). When this correspondent visited, they practised on
KhanAcademy but then played SKUNK, a game involving probability.
America’s standardised tests are now “easy, a floor, not of
interest”, says Ms Thordarson. She feels that the tool thus allows her
to teach better and go deeper. But “You have to be more creative and
more flexible, which is challenging,” she says. It’s not for teachers
who “want to turn a page in a book”, adds Kelly Rafferty, the
co-teacher. They thereby answer one common misconception about
KhanAcademy: that it makes live teachers less relevant. Mr Khan, the
teachers and Mr Gates all insist that the opposite is the case. It can
liberate a good teacher to become even better. Of course, it can also
make it easy for a bad teacher to cop out.
The value of teachers
The arrival of a powerful new tool thus does not replace the other
necessary element in education reform, the raising of teacher quality.
Good teaching is the single biggest variable in educating pupils, bigger
than class size, family background or school funding, says Eric
Hanushek, an education expert at Stanford University’s Hoover
Institution. And crucial to having better teachers is evaluating them
properly, hiring, firing and promoting on merit.
The teachers’ unions, however, are fighting all attempts to move away
from systems in which pay and tenure are linked only to seniority and
credentials. In some places, such as Washington, DC, the reformers have
won a few skirmishes; in others, such as Los Angeles, the unions are
digging in for a long war. The core question is how, even whether,
teachers can be evaluated fairly on the basis of exam results or
classroom observation (given that some pupils are from educated
families, others from poor areas, and so on). The unions are doing their
best to ensure that evaluations have no consequences in staffing.
Technology can play a part here, because, in essence, evaluation is
an information problem. Today’s standardised tests are deservedly
unpopular with teachers and parents because, first, the “standards” tend
to be low (and easily lowered further); second, teaching to the test is
a form of dumbing down; and third, the tests take place only once or
twice a year.
By contrast, spend a few minutes playing with the KhanAcademy
dashboard of a class in Los Altos, and you see a vision of the future.
You can follow the progress of each child-where she started, how she
progressed, where she got stuck and “unstuck” (as Ms Thordarson likes to
put it). You can also view the progress of the entire class. And you
could aggregate the information of all the classes taught by one
teacher, of an entire school or even district, with data covering a
whole year.
Dennis van Roekel, the president of the National Education
Association (NEA), the largest labour union in America with 3.2m
members, goes ballistic at this suggestion. “Don’t demean the
profession” by implying that you can rate teachers with numbers, he
says. Besides, this sort of thing would introduce destructive
competition into a culture that should be collaborative, he adds
(without explaining why data-driven evaluations have not destroyed
collaboration in other industries).
The NEA and its supporters will eventually lose this fight, says Kate
Walsh, the president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a
think-tank that unions love to hate. “It will be considered fair game to
collect the data” and to use them to get better teachers in America’s
classrooms, she says. It may or may not be KhanAcademy’s software that
produces this information. Nonetheless, the academy, “by offering a
different model, is forcing the issue that people have speculated
about”, says Mr Hanushek at Stanford. “These technological ideas offer
the possibility of breaking a logjam.”
Оригинал http://www.economist.com/node/21529062