{"id":393,"date":"2013-03-06T13:29:21","date_gmt":"2013-03-06T13:29:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/wp\/?p=393"},"modified":"2013-04-01T03:01:37","modified_gmt":"2013-04-01T03:01:37","slug":"why-i-disagree-with-mr-kahn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/2013\/03\/06\/why-i-disagree-with-mr-kahn\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I disagree with Mr. Kahn"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have to say that I am not usually a controversial blogger \u2013 I\u2019ll just put that out there right away.\u00a0 However, I am so frustrated with the conversations, blog posts and articles that are zipping around the blogosphere about online learning, MOOCs and Khan Academy that I have to say something about it as a teacher, teacher educator and responsible learner, myself, about education theory.\u00a0 I have taught online classes, taken online classes, used open source materials for my classes and definitely promote the idea of equal \u201cworld-class education for anyone, anywhere.\u201d\u00a0 However, I have yet to see how that quality education occurs online and especially the way that it is promoted in Salman Khan\u2019s book, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined.<\/em><\/p>\n

Now let\u2019s just put something else out there right away \u2013 it might be that I am frustrated by the fact that he has no background experience in education (which he admits – \u201cI had no teacher training\u201d) and I am offended that he is speaking out of turn speaking as if he does.\u00a0 For example, he says \u201cThere\u2019s an old saying that \u2018life is school.\u2019\u201d\u00a0 Hmmm, I wonder who said that? And I\u2019m not sure that\u2019s really the right saying.\u00a0 Or it could be that he is attacking the very discipline that I am working so hard to change \u2013 mathematics.\u00a0 I totally agree that there is a lot that is wrong with the way mathematics is taught in the U.S.\u00a0 But NOT<\/em> going all \u201crogue\u201d and working against the people who have already done some research on the subject and know a little about which they talk, might be a good place to start.\u00a0 There are many things that Mr. Kahn discusses in his book that he seems to purport as novel ideas like Mastery Learning, Flipping the Classroom, etc. that are not his ideas.\u00a0 So let\u2019s pretend that the fact that he wrote a book of concepts that seem to be a compilation of educational reform ideas that have been around for a while is not what really annoys me.<\/p>\n

What really gets my goat, if I seem to have his idea right, is that he is advocating for \u201ca free world-class education, for anyone anywhere\u201d but I\u2019m not really seeing how this is going to happen.\u00a0 He advocates for the use of the Khan Academy for mastery learning in the classroom (in a school system) where the students watch the videos and then come to class and do \u201cprojects\u201d with each other in the \u201cone room schoolhouse.\u201d\u00a0 I actually agree that this is a wonderful learning scenario that promotes creativity, independence in learning and individualized lessons for students of all ability levels. \u00a0Besides the huge government and system-wide testing restrictions that are currently in place and teachers’ current use of assessment, it would be very difficult (but not impossible) to change this system. \u00a0Kahn very naively writes a 5-page chapter on Tests and Testing<\/em>, which again is nothing new, on the evils of standardized testing and why they don’t really tell you anything about students’ knowledge. \u00a0His “one room schoolhouse” is an idealistic utopia of learning for someone who has never been in the classroom and dealt with classroom management, assessment, review or planning of these open-ended projects.\u00a0 I do believe that a great deal of teacher training would need to be reformed and reviewed in order for something like this to happen and before any school thinks of moving to a model like this they should think wisely about the ways in which teachers are ready to handle the change of the classroom culture and how they are ready to deal with it. \u00a0Students will still have questions about the material and will all be at different places in the content and the projects, which will probably demand more planning from the teachers (which again, is not a reason not to flip the classroom, but a necessity of which to be aware). I found what he put forth as the ideal classroom short-sighted and with many limitations.<\/p>\n

Secondly, what about the \u201canyone, anywhere\u201d Idea? Even if children in third-world countries have access to internet-ready computer to watch these videos, where are the teachers and schools to have them do the \u201cworld-class\u201d learning with these group projects?\u00a0 Where is their utopian learning environment?\u00a0 I am confused about how watching videos online is giving them a \u201cworld-class\u201d education (although I could see how it was free<\/strong> if Mr. Gates donated a bunch of computers and Internet access, etc.).\u00a0 Mr. Kahn also realized that \u201cteaching is a \u2026skill \u2013 in fact, an art that is creative, intuitive, and highly personal\u2026[which] had the very real potential to empower someone I cared about.\u201d\u00a0 Yes, Mr. Kahn, that\u2019s what teaching is all about.\u00a0 Teaching is about, as you said, \u201cgenuinely [sharing\u00a0 your] thinking and express[ing] it in a conversational style, as if I was speaking to an equal who was fundamentally smart but just didn\u2019t fully understand the material at hand.\u201d\u00a0 How is that supposed to happen for someone sitting alone watching a video?<\/p>\n

In the NY Times article, The Trouble with Online Learning<\/em>, Mark Edmunson wrote:<\/p>\n

\u201cLearning at its best is a collective enterprise, something we\u2019ve known since Socrates. You can get knowledge from an Internet course if you\u2019re highly motivated to learn. But in real courses the students and teachers come together and create an immediate and vital community of learning. A real course creates intellectual joy, at least in some. I don\u2019t think an Internet course ever will. Internet learning promises to make intellectual life more sterile and abstract than it already is \u2014 and also, for teachers and for students alike, far more lonely.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is the heart of Relational Pedagogy, that the interhuman connection between people is what constructs knowledge and the trust, authority, and value of perspective that is shared and given to each other is just as important as the content that is exchanged – most especially in mathematics, it\u2019s just taking us a lot longer to figure this out, Mr. Kahn.<\/p>\n\n

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I have to say that I am not usually a controversial blogger \u2013 I\u2019ll just put that out there right away.\u00a0 However, I am so frustrated with the conversations, blog posts and articles that are zipping around the blogosphere about online learning, MOOCs and Khan Academy that I have to say something about it as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,19,18],"tags":[22,105],"class_list":["post-393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-relational-pedagogy","category-technology","tag-online-learning","tag-relational-pedagogy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":432,"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393\/revisions\/432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}